Il Pomeriggio

“But this is the point. You die for your country. Suppose. Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!” –James Joyce, “Ulysses”

The early evening seemed squalid, though somewhat warm. Blotches of purple, cerulean and always the thick white - the summers in the south are never blue. Fernando's mother had gone to Venice and we had only a couple of hours to enjoy, more than we had had in long weeks. “Il Pomeriggio” was always the place; after all none of us was older than sixteen, and in spite of the dyed hair, the trench coats and the incessant smoking, the obvious anxiety gave our ages away at mere hindsight.

Honorary membership in the bourgeoisie gave teenagers in those days the privilege of partaking in the world of the adults; especially expensive alcohol and lies. The nervous conversations, like verses written in free style without punctuation, filled the entire air and froze it, showering the half empty martini glasses with a thawing breath, half incomprehensible, half miraculous. It is called love. Only at “Il Pomeriggio” such pleasures could be thoroughly enjoyed, not entirely free from guilt.

When he left – as the clouds turned from purple into violet and then invited the ocean of dark – I thought, “Maybe I could linger a little longer”. I was a careful observer of nature; not of the plants and thrushes, as much as of the faces. “Where is this man going?” I asked myself. “—Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to? –Hello, M.Coy. Nowhere in particular.” I imagined that conversation from the Ulysses. And anyway, observation of human nature at that moment saved me.

Saved me from provincialism, from the inanity of home, from the obligation to read that book about the “Ladies in Blue” fresco from the Cretan palace of Knossos and anyway Juana had interpreted much better than me. She was better than me in everything, in the love of Greek and in the love of men, that came to her easily. At a time when I struggled still with a few phrases from Xenophon, she was already reading Euripides and was a regular fixture at the important parties in the city, which I only dreamt attending.

I wasn’t curious about the parties because I thought it would be nice to be free for a few hours, but rather the opposite. I wondered about the little deaths of the people and the stories they had to tell. Maybe I would meet somebody interesting. I guess that is why I began writing in the first place: Since the people I had met at the parties had never been interesting – with the sole exception of Tundama, whom I met many years later and now lives in Siberia – perhaps the anonymous readers I would find them.

I thought that the world was divided in two: Those who belong to the secret society of books and those who don’t. For that very reason, I always walked around with a book and when I sat in cafes in the city, I thought that reading a book would always bring people to me with a casual “I also read that book!” or even better, “That’s an interesting book! I’d like to read it as well”. This of course never happened. Neither did it in the countless museums, art galleries or even brothels. Reading books in brothels. How little did I understand.

But that night at “Il Pomeriggio” was not like the other nights, walking all night, looking for someone to talk to. In the cold, in the rain, in the brimming sunlight. Sonia was very elegant, like those women I had seen only in films and sometimes at the tailor’s shop. Her long hair sprouted sidewards like a fountain of glittering brown and formed one vast unity with her fur coat. It all began with a cigarette, still unlighted for her. Then the coughing and that young people shouldn’t be smoking. Then the shy approval.

My grandmother, prostrated in her bed, so full of hubris and slurs, seemed from an entirely different planet. Sonia was a psychoanalyst and then we talked about Fernando: “But he’s so young!” she exclaimed, as if forgetting for a moment that so was I. “Isn’t that a curious name of yours?” she inquired and then I told her it was a name for a Jew. Her friend, Mrs. Goldman, also exhilaratingly beautiful had just left and Sonia told me she was also a psychoanalyst, and her parents had come after the Holocaust.

I wasn’t too worried about an age difference of at least four decades, and all what mattered after all was the friendship. Not the friendship of comradeship or complicity, but rather the polite, distant and very political friendship of conversation. I didn’t know quite well what “Zionist” meant at the time, except that all Jews were Zionists, because Israel was the land that the Eternal, our God, had given to us. Israel was not in this planet, it was something otherworldly. Sonia taught me, but not on that day.

The next time I saw Sonia – a few weeks later – she invited me for a succulent dinner at the same place and I was so elated, never had I eaten in a luxurious restaurant like that, then given alcoholic drinks and chocolates and cigarettes. At my age, I only had enough money to buy one drink – always the cheapest on the menu – and cigarettes I stole from my father’s drawer. She told me then a mysterious tale: Her father, a Palestinian, had once bought a Hebrew manuscript in Damascus and she wanted to know what the age of the text was.

Along the way, I learnt that “your people, the Zionists” burnt the house of her father and forced him into exile, long before the establishment of the state. Then he fled to Lebanon where he met her mother, and together they left for the new world, though they were always called “Turks”, because Lebanon still belonged to the Ottoman empire and they traveled the entire world on a boat with nothing but a Turkish passport. That night I learnt that the Zionists had burnt her father’s house and that knowledge still didn’t change anything.

I didn’t speak Hebrew at such an early age – though little did I know, how soon I would find myself in Jerusalem – but I had been taking Greek for two years with Noel, who had been once a militant priest in a revolution and learnt the sacred tongues in Rome and in Jerusalem. He invited me to join his class in Biblical Hebrew, in which for the first time I learnt what the dots below the letters in the prayer book meant and how they were to be deciphered. I took a copy of the Damascus manuscript to him and waited patiently for an answer.

In the meantime, a friend of Sonia – another psychoanalyst – had gone insane after quitting her medication and was now in a mental facility. In the meantime, Sonia had taken to drinking and thought a lot about her father. She told me about the Holy Land, to which she had been once, and where her father house had been, in a place where years later I found instead, a restaurant of Lebanese exiles. Once I called Sonia from Jerusalem to tell her that I had found this restaurant where her father’s home once had been.

About ten years had passed and she no longer remembered me. That’s what happens when you mix alcohol with Alzheimer. But I remembered that “we” had burnt her father’s house, so I came back to the restaurant and asked the Lebanese couple to allow me to put some flowers in the memory of her father, who never saw the Holy Land again. Now I knew who the Zionists were, and I longer had a rational explanation for the expulsion of Sonia’s father. I felt sorry. I wanted to walk all the way to Beirut, and say to people I was sorry.

Of course most of us had been taught that the love of the people of Israel and the love of the state, were one and the same. And why would you not love your people? After all, it was on the name of these people that world history had been wronged; the utopia hadn’t come. How could God have given us this land? Then I remembered my first time in Jerusalem, walking along the street of the Prophets and telling myself: “So, this is the Holy City. Stench of sweat, garbage and dust.”

Perhaps we took it. Perhaps we took it because there was nowhere else for us to go. Perhaps we burnt Sonia’s father house because we were full of resentment. And who is this “we”? Why can’t we be treated as individuals? Zionist no longer means anything other than “those Zionists”, e.g. those who burnt Sonia’s father house. Criminals, villains, thieves. There are no other Zionists. There are no good Zionists. We shouldn’t have stolen the land in the first place. We should have stayed in Europe. Mourn our dead there.

I’ve asked myself for so long, what would have Sonia thought of me, had she lived to see me today? Would she also tell me, “I have no problems with Jews, only with Zionists”, like Ali did? Would she also tell me that we should have stayed in Europe? Would she also call me a jerk? I wonder if Sonia would have returned to Palestine. Perhaps we’re wrong, and no justice can be delivered on any of these peoples, perhaps it is like the Book of Job, we can’t be redeemed even if we do everything to be redeemed. There’s no insurance.

This should have never happened. I told myself so many times as I drove alongside the road to Jericho, and I saw the Israeli soldiers strip searching the Palestinian women clad in abayas. This should have never happened. I told myself when I had to watch on TV the soldiers stabbed, their eyes gouged out and their bodies disemboweled in a square in Ramallah. This should have never happened. I told myself when a friend who bragged about having killed many Arabs was himself killed in Lebanon. I buried him too.

But the truth is that all this did happen and a lot more. Who are these Zionists that burnt Sonia’s father house and that she could never forgive? Perhaps some of them were simply dreamers, running from the Soviet Union, running from poverty, running from death. Perhaps they were born, like Sonia, to people whose houses were burnt too. Perhaps they didn’t have enough time to read Herzl’s “Jewish State” and barely had enough time to reach a boat and leave their entire families behind.

All of them, those people who built that country in which I lived and where I paid homage to Sonia’s parents; they were not murderers, they were not thieves, they were not criminals. They just wanted to live. Those Zionists. Once I heard Tim Hetherington say that wars are something very human – people are put with weapons at two sides of a mountain and asked to defend their comrades. This is how this country was born, in a war. People do terrible things in wars, in order to survive. Even good people.

What if Ali and I went to war? Would he kill me to survive? Would he burn my house? I don’t know, but probably I would. All I learnt from Sonia – in between the lines – is that this war already happened, and we shouldn’t fight the wars of other people. Forgive me, friends, if I can’t un-make the past of my people, since I’m only an individual. This is one tragic story, so countless our dead. But it is a tragedy of two. There’s no innocence to be had in tragedies. Not yours and not mine.

Forgive me if I think you border on hate when you think they’re innocent and we’re guilty; forgive me if I think you border on hate when you think we should have never come; forgive me if I think that you have a problem with me when only my people has to bear all the blame. Forgive me if I think you’re unfair when you label me a jerk for defending myself from generalization. Please forgive me. Forgive me for thinking this is a world made only of individuals, who love and hate, who do good and evil, who have grace and cruelty, all at once.

The only important thing is that I will not die for my country, perhaps for you, but never for my country.

Jewish-Arab Politics & Love. 5 Years Later.

For Eman, Aisha and Ali.

I

I was 22 years old then, and used to travel every morning with the line twentysomething, to my usual spot at the library, in the Hebrew University; I wanted to write a book but the truth is that I could hardly concentrate for more than a few pages and as I looked out the enormous glass panel I was fascinated by the strong light, filtering through thin clouds - something of dust - and that in patches reached the top and the sides of certain buildings, adjacent to Zion Square.

Sometimes I sat  with Yuli outside the balcony, there were some bushes surrounding it, glittering and dazzling, and in the far distance, the kites of the Palestinian children. They flew above the little houses and reached almost the parking lot at Mt. Scopus but never flew above our heads; it wasn't flying like a free kite would, but more like blazing, jerking, stumbling. The kite seller would sit nearby, almost invisible from our distance - physical and otherwise - and offer the children an assortment of kites and strings.

The kites were not colorful, or even beautiful. They only featured flags from the countries - now at war, or always - and different shades of military stationery. I imagined his name of Mohammed, but then I changed it to Ali, because it would rhyme with my name. The young boy that flew the kite with the green military stationery, that resembled the planes that I saw once flying out of somewhere, en route to Lebanon, a year earlier. I probably wouldn't have remembered the war much, hadn't Hadar's husband died in it.

Yes, the kites. In the later hours, as I sat in Efraim's class - and the whole world was for me there in that moment - I dreamt about the kites, and I dreamt that I was not the boy flying the kite, but that I was the kite itself. A novel I had read once came to mind: "Life is elsewhere". I wanted to be flown high above, and to look into Palestine and Jordan, like I had once, from that tower in Ramat Gan across the Diamond Exchange. Thus, I kept looking for it, looking into being a kite.

On a certain way I took on a journey, and I wanted to go to Palestine, perhaps by foot. I left the Gate of Damascus in the morning and cut across Salah ha-Din street, zigzagging the veiled women selling vegetables - fresh but dirty - in between the stench of Arab pop, calls to prayer and shouts of border police. I kept venturing inside the East, and went as far as the Cafe Europa. Shabby as it was, I enjoyed the campari blending inside the arteries of the bleeding grapefruits; but even more I enjoyed Ahmed.

I wanted Cafe Europe to remind me of a text of Erich Kästner I had translated from German, about the "Römanische Cafe" in Berlin where all sort of Jewish exiles - painters, artists, writers - congregated in between the two world wars; sitting once at the Kurfürstendam until 1925 and then later on the Budaspester St. 10. And anyway it was on the Kurfürstendam that Hannah Arendt sat with Kurt Blumenfeld to drink wine and recite Greek poetry on her last night in Germany before going into exile.

It was the last of the literary salons to which Jews in Germany had access, ever since the Jewesses Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz had founded the salons of the Romantic period, for those who didn't share the conventions of the world. So I felt with Ahmed, the owner, pretending that I was simply a Christian tourist who wanted to see the Holy Land - how easy would that be! - in order not to have to reveal information about my background. Just like I had done so often, in the diaspora.

I had learnt to speak like Markus, the Austrian priest I had once loved, and I imagined myself to be somebody like him: A modern Templar. We spoke for hours about the poor Christians in the Holy Land, the checkpoints, the Israeli brutality, the Christian emigration. It was a rarity at the time to find alcohol in East Jerusalem, though Shadi, my Palestinian friend, who had once come all the way from Ramallah through hours at the checkpoints, to bring me food on a day when I was physically emaciated from a bad love.

And I continued on my journey by foot, thinking that if I keep walking, I'll reach Palestine one day. I wasn't afraid, because kites do not know fear. After Salah ha-Din and the American colony, I kept on walking undear an even more fearless sun, in between the houses and the half pavimented streets, from another age. The disgruntled Arab mansions screaming out their colonial pride greeted me with joy, and the half demolished, half bombed houses, they reminded me of our wars, of our open wounded.

Reaching Al-Ram checkpoint I saw for the first time the fence, and I leant against it, still thinking that a kite could break through the concrete walls, sprayed with paint. But the checkpoint was closed on that day - even though the soldiers, obviously not Jewish, were sitting in a nearby shop, playing tabla with the Arab shopkeepers - and yet I walked in the other direction, deep inside the womb of Palestine, the entire day, until I got lost. And I wanted to get lost.

I was a kite. Kites get lost.

II

Perhaps I hadn't seen enough. And at night, such a warm night, that day I was so afraid, afraid of losing sight of the land that had just disclosed its secrets to me, I was afraid of coming back; I wanted nothing but to merge with that land, to be one of its walls with bullet holes, to be one of its graves. But I wondered if kites knew love, if kites knew forgiveance, if kites could write books. Every time I dream a dream, it is always incomplete, too verbal, too sexual, compared to being a kite, a kite in Palestine.

And in my anonymity, armed with nothing but a scrapbook, one of which was lost and the other was sent to a friend in Vienna, where there's a Cafe Europe nowadays, I kept walking to Palestine by foot; sometimes simply going down the Old City, into the villages, watching the lives of the men and the women, trying to understand their gestures, imagining that once I lived there, in those houses that were older than God. Again, I had to make up a new story each time, of who I was, of what I was looking for, of what I really was.

This was long before hate. Long before I knew death. And I had escaped the bombs by a few minutes about five times, and had buried my friend Dan who had died in one. But I was unable to link it to anyone in specific. I always said, yeah, the terrorists, "that" people, "those" groups, and looked the other way. Anyway, you need to understand that living in Jerusalem is being part of graveyard anyway. Tourism in Jerusalem is going from place to place, seeing who died there, beginning with God.

Who knows if what I was lacking is loyalty. But that's not important. Not even the hate is, which I learnt a lot later. It is but the disgrace and the scorn what I learnt then. I used to teach an old woman, from Poland, and a Holocaust survivor, how to use the computer. She somehow reminded me of myself; the yearning for Christianity, and the utter despise of Judaism as something vulgar, and unsuitable for beauty. I used to spend hours in her home, listening to her professor husband, and being properly fed.

She came from Bedzin, it was also from this town that the parents of Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Jew turned Cardinal of the Catholic church, were born. I knew Kela and him had met once, in some Holocaust remembrance. They were secular Jews, and not those who stopped believing in God, but rather, were never given an opportunity to believe in him in the first place. I guess it doesn't change the passion, the concern, the longing: Change the world. Change the world. Change the world.

It was through her that I joined the "Women in Black", mostly socialists and communists, very old Israelis from the upper middle class bourgeoisie, mainly East European, who assembled every Friday morning at the square across Terra Sancta college, which I think is called Paris Square. There people dressed in black and protested for half a day every Friday against the Occupation. There I met again David Neuhaus, the South African-born Israeli, Jew turned Catholic, and now a priest at a seminary in Beit Jalla.

Of course I had no political ideas or agenda, and it's not that I wasn't mature enough to have one, for after all I was a philosopher and philosophers are supposed to have interesting opinions, at the very least. My friend Moshe, who was with me at the religious school told me a few weeks ago - after many years of not seeing him - that he had seen me once there, and felt pity for me. Then came the tomatoes, the slurs, the insults, and once the guns.

I guess that there's nothing in the world that can explain with precision what I was trying to do, since I had come to this country because it was a land of freedom, it was a land for Jews, where we could be free, where being a Jew would be nothing but a fact of life, rather than an obstacle in it. I can't remember exactly what I thought then. Was there space for other people? What did I think of the Arabs? I remember my first time in East Jerusalem, by mistake. I was paralyzed by fear. I thought I would die.

But I guess today I understand that fear and hate and love are largely part of one and the same feeling. That is the only reason why I am writing this. And it the was the curiosity of fear what led me to want to be a kite in the first place. And to go beyond being a kite. What is it that I want and fear from the other? What is it that I want and fear from love? That's what I wanted to find out. What was lost was the ideal of the home. Could one be ever had? Could it be had once it was lost?

The battle is no longer mine. And I guess that's what embitters me. I can no longer fight a battle in which I don't believe, and of which I've never been part. Of course I wanted justice, like everyone else. But what kind of justice is this? For peoples? Some at the expense of the others? There was a time when I was proud of "us". But I can't be proud of what I didn't myself make, I merely belong to them, it's sheer presence. I no longer think that peoples can make peace.

Only individuals can. By obliterating themselves from the group. Like a heresy.

III

And like it was 5 years ago, on that summer, when I met Bader, without even knowing or thinking that he might be an Arab. It was him who asked me if I minded being someone who wasn't Jewish, and it was me who said that I did, without even knowing that he wasn't one. The first in a long series of auto-productions and auto-destructions that have run unmolested through a history that clenches its fists against me, sometimes with humor, and sometimes only with cruelty.

Jewish-Arab politics. That I thought - and written - back then. Where are we today? I know. We are in that place I visited in 2007: Where everything is so political that nothing is political at all. Politics has conquered every corner of life, every feeling, every sentiment, every space, even love. How many generations ago did we say that if there would be peace, we could live in the Middle East? How many times did we say it about ourselves? How much peace is there?

It seems to me as if we're sailing on a sinking boat, and my great teacher Agnes always said that one doesn't leave a sinking boat. We've done this all the way wrong, defending ourselves as Jews or Arabs or as members of humanity and mankind and what not; establishing an infinite gap that cannot be crossed by any human being in the flesh. It's only transmission of knowledge and ideas. There's no possibility of any dialogue in terms of what happened to your people, what happened to my people.

Simone Weil always said: "There's no such a thing as we". Human beings of flesh and bone, like ourselves, do not embody the dynamics of goodness in such a way that everything is excluded. There's no such goodness. The reason why love is the extremest experience for human beings is precisely that we're capable of so much goodness as much as we're capable of such cruelty. The human experience - and history attests to this - makes them both coeval. There's no love without cruelty; there's no love without grace.

My friend Michael, once upon time, told me that when he was in the army, he had found a beautiful young boy in Gaza - that long time ago - who was starving, and he had thought that it would be funny and interesting to trade food for sex with him. And two years later they were living in Tel Aviv, after the young boy had fled from his village, and then both fled the country into European freedom. And I thought, would I have acted differently? Probably not.

The whole point of civil (and world) responsibility is not to find that anyone or anything is universally guilty or universally innocent - and both ideas are identical in their consequences - but that we are all averted with the same mission, the victims and the perpetrators and with nothing but "this should have never happened". Reconciliation is a mission that can never come to peoples, it never comes to faiths and it can never happen more than once. Forgiving destroys equality; this only God can do. It establishes an infinite distance.

The battleground of ideas, in which we argue each other about the truth and the lie of everything, the exposures, the crimes, the rights; it is not our right to do so. Only those who were wronged personally must be confronted with those who wronged them. It is outright seditious to fight battles in the names of peoples. Especially in the name of dead peoples. Never before (even as a Jew in the European context) was I personally so exposed to the condition of hate than under the aegis of the Palestinian struggle in the name of freedom, liberty, rights and values.

I never saw my role as that of a mediator - for I had excluded myself from Jewish society as well - but rather as a critic, in which of course the mere givenness of my political and social status has weighed over any possible contributions and the defense of the life of the mind between both Israelis and Palestinians (and other Arabs) has been the most costly crusade. Because I was independent and never politically attached, I never had a position, and accepted everything in good will in the name of PERSONAL sentiments.

But to be averted with a mission alone is a task more than difficult. This being said, of course I've failed in my misson not just a couple of times, but every time. And personal relationships between Jews and Arabs have - at least in my case, with the sole exception of the people to whom this lecture is dedicated and that's not even certain - have always become a battleground in which political disputes are meant to be solved whenever something, that is, something strictly personal, goes wrong. And so it goes, for many others.

Since I can no longer participate in battles that for me are imagined, I can only conclude by saying that politics will never solve any of our conflicts, instead it will only enlarge their scope - that now includes our personalities as well. I no longer sympathize with what my people, as much as I don't sympathize with the Palestinian struggle or with the Arab revolutions. This doesn't mean that I've opted for Nihilism or its social and moral equivalent, a-politia.

All what I am trying to say is that I shall never participate in struggles that do not belong entirely to the radical needs of individuals, who are the only recipients of freedom and the only ones able to act upon, should this be ever achieved. Every friendship and love - political and otherwise - between Jews and Arabs AS Jews and Arabs is not only not a sinking boat, it's not even a boat to begin with. Peoples can never make peace as peoples, and interfaith dialogues (of any kind) should always bear in mind what a teacher from older times said to me always in reference to the Holocaust: "How can you teach the Germans about Judaism if you haven't forgiven them for what their parents did?". It's all in your hands, individual, friend, enemy.

All I can say is, I'm sorry Palestine, I'm sorry Lebanon.

Fragments

Writing is not and can't be a substitute for living.

All my frustrations go back to the original frustration: Inability to communicate with people.

I've just realized how dishonest my experience of love has been. It has demanded an insane level of communication, which is precisely, the one thing people could never give me.

Tallking to oneself is the worst humilliation. That's how one begins to write, trying to save his honor from the spiritual mediocrity of friendship.

One should best love people in silence. Language, though a blessing for me, is for most, their disgrace.

It's important to remember people don't mean what they say, even when they're telling the truth. It's not that they don't believe it, but that they don't understand the promise that words makes explicit.

I'm so terribly impatient about communication with people. I could lose my temper over an unanswered message. I'm not just impatient but merciless. The impatience can only degenerate into two things: Either the destruction of all friendships or the acute awareness that one lives in such isolation. Patience doesn't make the situation better, it only adds a futile element of denial and asceticism.

The most terrible thing there is, is writing for other people. People will never read it. If they're in love with you, they're too busy with loving your character, if they're not in love with you, they're too busy criticizing your character.

I'm a lot more idiotic in silence than I am with words. I can't handle people's silence, especially when I know it's only of the careless kind.

Friendship and love should be one and the same. It just turns out that love is the dumbest creature. That's why one prefers and ultimately stays with friends, even if they're mediocre spirits, like most people are.

There's no such a thing as intellectual love affairs. Love can't be intellectual. If there's not a minimum of sexuality, hatred and fear involved, it can be hardly called love. Intellectuals are asexual, morally neutral and cowardly, that is, they can never admit to fear.

Fragments: Sontag on Benjamin

He thought of himself as a melancholic, disdaining modern psychological labels and invoking the traditional astrological one: "I came into the world under the sign of Saturn - the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays..."

The metaphor of the labyrinth also suggests Benjamin's idea of obstacles thrown up by his own temperament.

The influence of Saturn makes people "apathetic, indecisive, slow", he writes in "The Origins of German Trauerspiel" (1928). Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic temperament. Blundering is another, from noticing too many possibilities, from not noticing one's lack of practical sense. And stubbornness, from the longing to be superior - on one's own terms.

Benjamin regards everything he chooses to recall in his past as prophetic of the future, because the work of memory (reading oneself backward, he called it) collapses time.

Benjamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spatializing the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins. To understand something is to understand its topography, to know how to chart it. And to know how to get lost.
For the character born under the sign of Saturn, time is the medium of constraint, inadequacy, repetition, mere fulfillment. In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person. Benjamin's poor sense of direction and inability to read a street map become his love of travel and his mastery of the art of straying.

Since the Saturnine temperament is slow, prone to indecisiveness, sometimes one has to cut one's way through with a knife. Sometimes one ends by turning the knife against oneself.

The mark of the Saturnine temperament is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which can never be taken for the granted. The self is a text - it has to be deciphered. (Hence, this is an apt temperament for intellectuals).

One characteristic of the Saturnine temperament is slowness: "The tyrant falls on account of the sluggishness of his emotions." "Another trait of the predominance of Saturn", says Benjamin, is "faithlessness".

Precisely because the melancholy character is haunted by death, it is melancholics who know best how to read the world. Or, rather, it is the world which yields itself to the melancholic's scrutiny, as it does to no one else's. The more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious can be the mind which contemplates them.

Bookhunting, like the sexual hunt, adds to the geography of pleasure - another reason for strolling about in the world.

One is condemned to work; otherwise, one might not do anything at all. Even the dreaming of the melancholic temperament is harnessed to work, and the melancholic may try to cultivate phantasmagorical states, like dreams, or seek the access to concentrated states of attention offered by drugs.

To get work done, one must be solitary -or, at least, not bound to any permanent relationship.

For the melancholic, the natural, in the form of family ties, introduces the falsely subjective, the sentimental; it is a drain on the will, on one's independence; on one's freedom to concentrate on work. It also presents a challenge to one's humanity to which the melancholic knows, in advance, he will be inadequate.

The style of work of the melancholic is immersion, total concentration. Either one is immersed, or attention floats away.

His characteristic form remained the essay. The melancholic's intensity and exhaustiveness of attention set natural limits to the length at which Benjamin could develop his ideas. His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct.

His style of thinking and writing, incorrectly called aphoristic, might better be called freeze-frame baroque.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina. The melancholic, who feels he lacks will, may feel he needs all the destructive energy he can muster.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consolation notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

Accidents (Fragment)

For Ali

"The Sky is the limit, and the limit is the first step".

He read that in the flap jacket of a book, several years ago. He had received the book as a present from a friend and the sentence was splattered somewhere along the book, perhaps at the end of a certain poem, written in a language whose characters he already recognized but yet couldn't infer the meanings behind the squares and circles yet. Not even by guessing.

Guesswork. "I am good at that", he thought. A lot of writer's writing is but guesswork. "Why don't you write a novel?" was probably the question of his professor, who couldn't read out or distinguish the fictions from the theorems. Distinction between novelists and philosophers: Philosophers are not supposed to think with emotions. First aesthetic crusade: Emotions and feelings are but merely different kinds of thoughts.

Fictions. The biggest fiction: Socrates. The biggest fallacy: Plato as the foundation of reason. The casualty: Truth. Historians also write fiction, the most meticulous kind thereof. The curse: A absolute denial of fiction. The refusal to write fiction is translated in being condemned to live many fictions, and out of them. Pure thought. What is that supposed to mean? It is an autobiography without events, without plot.

Smoking is like writing. It is nothing but ellapsed time: Waiting. Constant change of topics, constant change of fiction. Second aesthetic crusade: Intellectual promiscuity, or, the acute realization of Plato's trauma and depression. Dogma isn't the result or the consequence of thinking; rather, it is an antithesis. The tyranny of the mind, it can overtake God's. Living in the waiting room: It's a time warp. Not ageging, but not living either.

Abstinence from language. There's no physical possibility of silence, not even in a soundless chamber. Writing is always an eternally the same: The recreation of romantic loss, or the re-enactment of the same romance. It can happen only under the Archimedean paradox: Use it against yourself. He doesn't talk, he doesn't write, he doesn't respond. But he isn't dead. Abstinence is way to prove you aren't either.

The book with the flap jacket traveled 8000 miles in a black suitcase, then it was lost in a cold apartment on a 13th floor, from which people pissed out of the window and that he couldn't keep paying - or maybe he never did - and that it was lost together with many other books. Not one single moment of love there. He had never read the book, except for some lines about a dead poet, that anyway were in another book.

There was an Italian cafe, and at the same time a revolution. Both of them elsewhere. Certain cold October hope that was written in a postcard. Malina: Why can't letters be sent and read on the same day they're written? The spectacular abyss. The fear. The dread. If not anything else, he wanted those letters to be read. But it would be illegal for the postwoman to do so. 

A certain novel about fictions, read three years later. The novel led to a book of fragments, one of which found its way to the last page of the letter. The book that arrived that day was written in the same city where the letter was going to be sent. The love was another fiction. All of it, probably. He still waited and waited. Probably he would never write, probably the fiction wasn't untrue enough to be believed.

There was not one single moment to breathe; he wanted to drink it all in. All the writing was a distraction, and he still didn't write. That didn't keep him from writing. Paradox: The search for absolute silence, and for extreme privacy; it only comes to those who know that they're being watched. Not watched by God, that would be the end of all literature.

Watched by illiterate relatives wondering what he does by night that doesn't bring any income. Watched by other writers, mostly dead, his favorite readers and those he know that would judge him even more mercilessly than he already does. Watched by those intensely awaited, watched by their callousness, watched by their silence, watched by the impossibility that led to it in the first place. Cruel reminder.

Translation. Interpretation. Criticism. Critique. Grammatology. Treatise. Every word of his put under the lens, baptized in frozen fires, engraved, and taught to master the arts of death. Only death is patient. After all, it is life's eternal patient. Another declension: The unnaturalness of passions, they don't understand time warps. They keep moving along, causing other accidents, and un-writing letters sent, long before they are read.

Huna London (Bahrain)

First published on BIKYAMASR

CAIRO: “All films are the same.” That is what Um Salman (Huda Sultan) told her husband Bu (Mubarak Khamis) on a certain night while watching a film on TV, after he had asked her if they hadn’t seen that movie before.

The question is two-fold: On the one hand, haven’t we seen all the movies before anyway? They’re vaults of memory and consciousness, expand upon them and are only limited by our experiences; on the other hand, the movie that they are watching is nowhere visible or perceptible and on a Truman Show fashion, the screen of their TV is unknowingly allowing them to peer into the world of the audience – that is, our world.

The scene takes place in “Huna London” (2012), a short film of Bahraini filmmaker Mohammed Rashed Bu Ali, a joint Bahraini-Emirati production that was just released on April 12 in the course of the 5th Gulf Film Festival, and the 6th production of the talented filmmaker.

In line with his previous work from “Absence” (2008) through “Under the Sky” (2011) the film draws on the language and cultural codes of Bahrain’s traditional life, but unlike the commonplace genre of “tradition” film, vastly popular in the Arab world, the project of Bu Ali is a lot more ambitious technically and conceptually.

Tradition films are usually seen as battlegrounds where the conflicts and struggles between traditional ways of life and the advance of modernity are staged and often ambiguously solved in a poetic manner, but also the center stage of radical criticism of society and nostalgia over a past already buried or forlorn.

Bu Ali’s films present a different strategy to stage the theater of consciousness in which the purely filmic finds its expression in storytelling rather than in history. The storytelling at work in these films isn’t the well-known strategy imported from literary prose in which a plot – whatever it might be – comes to a happy or moral resolution of the struggle of the hero, in a linear sequence.

The abstract poetics of his earlier films that were reviewed recently on BikyaMasr.com, nevertheless, gave way to a more mature process of filming and editing in which the experimental, poetic and highly realistic qualities of his films did not have to be sacrificed in order to conform to a more normative and linear film.

His previous work, that drew heavily on the idea of loneliness – without falling into gaps of consciousness and alienation – is somewhat left behind in “Huna London” and replaced by a more spoken, dialogical and whimsical film bordering on comedy; a genre today swallowed up by Hollywood and nearly forgotten in Arab cinema. Once again, Bu Ali manages to surprise and innovate.

The story of “Huna London” is rather simple: The couple of Bu and Um Salman are on a mission to have a photograph of them taken and sent to their son, who has left the homeland to go and study in London. What could have been easily done at a studio in the city becomes a movie-long adventure when the wife refuses to go to the studio, and a young photographer has to think of a way to capture the shot.

This could have never been the subject of a movie – let alone a comedy – hadn’t it been the case that something keeps getting on the way and preventing the simple task. A number of parallel stories unfold: The couple chasing after a rat, a cloud of indecision and the religious precautions on the part of Um.

Day after day, the couple stages another attempt to have their photo taken and after a series of predicaments, difficult positions, change of photographer, dress, background and a lot of laughter, the mission is accomplished in a singular manner.

As it is the case with Bu Ali’s film, the excellent music score provided by the great Bahraini composer Mohammed Haddad, heightens the dramatic effect of the whimsically written movie and what was a long series of meditations and silences in his previous films, becomes here a fairy tale, a legend, a chronicle and a parody.

Using the same visual configuration – and spatiality – of his previous films, the shift from an abstract dialogue – sometimes bordering on insanity and incommunicability – into a fully spoken narrative film is very smooth, and provides a natural continuity into a film that appeals to a more commercial audience and retains all of the aesthetic and thematic richness of his earlier films; in particular the creative use of “tradition” and “traditional life” without falling prey to the limited plot-resolution dialectics, normative of Arab films that make use of visual and social realism in their making.

Limited as the number of productions is in the emerging cinema of Bahrain – consisting of one full-length motion picture and a good number of short films – the tiny Gulf kingdom made a singular appearance during the Gulf Film Festival with a larger number of short films than that of many other countries and a broad range of topics and styles.

Mohammed Bu Ali continues being one of the youngest and most active filmmakers in the Bahraini scene and “Huna London” is a prime example of precise development and maturity, heading towards a new kind of cinema in the Arabian Gulf.

The region has managed to turn the genre of short films into a fully developed genre of cinema that is available also to an audience less specialized and less familiar with experimental and documentary films. At the same time that they are carrying out successfully the transition from cinema with specific social and historical messages and conflicts, into a home-grown cinema with universal themes and motifs, disenfranchised from political polemics and into a purer cinema, opening the way for a professional industry with limited resources and unlimited raw material.

The re-birth of cinema in the Arab world and its birth in the Arabian Gulf is an indicator of the democratization of culture in which cinema is not only the expression of conflict or the off-shot of a mass-media driven film industry in which the region is nothing but a geographic trope.

As more filmmakers and titles begin to emerge, films such as “Huna London” explore not just technical possibilities but also the identity of a new cinema – both artistic, global and regional – at the crossroads of turbulent transitions, not necessarily political, but mainly of consciousness and perception, in which cinema has played a pivotal role for over a hundred years, as one of the most vivid and immediately available vehicles of transmission.

Perhaps it is true that all films are the same. That is why we continue watching them, producing them, passing them under the lens of criticism. It is one and the same struggle always: Travelling without moving.

Mirrors of Silence (UAE)

First published on BIKYAMASR

CAIRO: In “Aesthetics of Silence” (1967) Susan Sontag writes: “Every era has to re-invent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment, aimed at resolving the painful structural conditions inherent in human situations, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is art.”

She goes on to add that modern art has re-drawn the lines of consciousness and hence of the site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness into an art that is something else than consciousness or knowledge, and in fact sees itself as an antidote to consciousness.

The quasi-religious or mystic aspirations of the modern artist crave for a cloud of knowing beyond knowledge and beyond consciousness, and as per Sontag: “for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the “subject” (the “object”, the “image”), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.”

This performance might seem in a way similar to that of the grandiose 19th century – said not without certain irony – and Romanticism that also found its way into the cinema in the radical aestheticism of American films from the early days of cinema that subsequent cinematic movements tried to mend with just as radical exercises of opposition.

The difference between the religion of art in the 19th and the 20th century – and cinema was born in the period in between – is that the concept of the beautiful underwent a significant transformation and “something went wrong” with it:

In the words of Agnes Heller:

“The aestheticization of the concept of the beautiful began with the religious cult of the works of art and with the cultivation of aesthetic taste in the service of this newly founded quasi-religion. As a result, aestheticization expands – it encompasses the way of life, the emotional household. The beautiful soul is no longer a simple and virtuous soul, but the soul of emotional over-refinement, receptivity, and good taste.

The concept of the beautiful paid a heavy price for having received a comfortable abode in the world of artworks; it became redundant. Beauty became just another word, an addendum, a synonym for perfection or “fitting form”. The Moor did his service; the Moor can leave.”

It is to this movement that the whole of 20th century art and cinema of course, responded with a radical divorce between beautiful and artistic. One can read in the novels of Milan Kundera his commonplace metaphor that beauty happens in the modern world by accident. The entirety of contemporary art – first only visually but later also in sound and the written word – can be now considered an accident, or, a long series of violent transgressions on itself.

Sontag writes: “Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown. A new elements enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it; the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition – and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself.”

One of best known strategies in artistic transgressions is silence. But there’s no absolute silence, rather, only different modes of conversation and communication. Silence is one of the most gifted forms of storytelling and Danish writer Isak Dinesen tells us what it entails:

“When the storyteller is loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken out last word, will hear the voice of silence.”

There are silent films and there is silence in films. The configuration of film is always very different than that of the other arts – if filmmaking is considered an art – because there’s nothing to film but cuts and editing. Films are cinematography and cinematography is exclusively montage. For this reason the performance of silence is always something other than itself, it is not the absolute renunciation of poetry in Rimbaud or the invisible theater of Kleist; silence in films is always filmic.

But silence in films was not born with silent films, rather with its demise: It wanted to find a stronger language, a purer code, to subtract itself from the noise in such a way that it would transgress the rules imposed by literature – specifically by prose – on the way films are made. Silence in films – at a time when sound was technically possible – was a contestation on the artistic authority of the movies and hence a confirmation of the quasi-religious visions that would turn filmmakers – at least certain kind of – in artists rather than entrepreneurs.

Sontag comments on the choice of silence on the part of Rimbaud and Wittgenstein: “But the choice of permanent silence doesn’t negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off – disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness.”

In the history of contemporary films there are many examples of this transgression towards silence as an absolute seriousness, but it would be difficult to come up with too many examples from Middle Eastern cinema where traditional storytelling and a battleground for ideological conflicts with politics and tradition is the most commonplace of cinematic experience.

If anything, Emirati director and actor Nawaf Al-Janahi’s film “Mirrors of Silence” (2006) may well be among the most interesting silence films produced in the Middle East to date. It is not that this kind of films are not produced and showcased often in every regional film festival but the fact that the film is not dealing with the silence associated with religion, with history or with the conflicts between modernity and tradition – to which the most common response in art is often an ambiguous and elongated silence.

“Mirrors of Silence” is a modernist tale set in Dubai and asking the question of distressing loneliness in a modern city, rather than telling a story about it. Its literary counterparts wouldn’t be the lamentation or the social critique as much as the stream of consciousness – the desire to overcome consciousness into a different, less hesitant kind of knowledge but within the paradoxical assumption that the question itself warns about the impossibility (or insufferableness) or the answer.

The movie is in a genre of films that do not portray situations as much as conditions and the main character – the only character if one is watching the film with the eye of consciousness rather than mere perception – is an archetypal portrayal of the modern condition of loneliness as opposed to solitude.

Solitude is the two in one: A situation – vital for the life of the mind – in which the person withdraws from appearing in the public world in order to be with himself and to keep himself company. Loneliness on the other hand appears here as the inability to appear in the world and to even keep oneself company; other words for this condition – which is not a situation – are alienation, solipsism and in popular culture, depression.

It is a refreshing curiosity to find this type of modern meditation on “being” expressed in a regional film that draws its inspiration from something other than the conflicts with modernity: What is at work here is a conflict within modernity rather than in opposition, defiance or rejection of it.

Urban loneliness is an eternal trope for filmic meditation that goes back to the first films ever made and that dialectically, gave birth to a type of cinema whose main characteristic isn’t to tell a story as much as to portray the inability to do so under conditions of modern life.

While “modern” isn’t an entirely uniform concept, the phenomena associated with it on the global scale are indeed very similar, and since the dynamics of modernity – consumption, loneliness, moral ambiguity, cultural and geographic promiscuity – can be seen replicated over the entire world, it has been very uncommon to find in the Middle East a discourse to reflect upon these things that is not deeply embedded in the critique of modernity, among which the discourse of neo-colonialism is prominent.

It would be foolish nonetheless to assume that the questions haven’t been asked, because the critique of modernity is a part of modernity itself and one of the requisites for its survival. With singular ambiguity – of the visual and historical kind – “Mirrors of Silence” dares into the grey zone of a more contemporary kind of cinema, breaking down the dividing lines – that exist only in the minds of critics – between art cinema and the so-called third or global cinema, that is characterized as a non-Western movement.

The film presents a meditation not only on the singularity of modern life but on the role of art itself within such life, and the position of the artist – that the character of the film is – in a society where emotional impoverishment is apparently the price to be paid for homogeneity and technical survival. What Al-Janahi tries to do in his film, is put to words by the Egyptian-Lebanese writer Yahia Lababidi: “No one is interested in the hunger artist. Professional fasting has lost its cachet with the public. The hunger artist is wasting away, forgotten, in the dirty straw of carnival rage.”

The questions raised by “Mirrors of Silence” cannot be possibly be answered with the languages available to art and to film, they can only be raised, and Al-Janahi has done so more than once; his film “On A Road” (2003) poses a similar question whose metaphors and visual codes are far stronger, and all the more poetic rather than narrative, if only because it is a raw experiment on filmic experience – and that is the distinction between art films and literature, films are about the expanded possibilities of experience rather than of consciousness alone – where the topic of loneliness figures even more prominently in the situation of a young man stranded on a road.

While the short duration and immense aesthetic and narrative ambiguity of “On A Road” leave very little space for commentary – other than inane criticism of technicalities – the film does stand as a relatively unique piece in Gulf cinema and “Mirrors of Silence” can be easily understood and perceived as a sequel. A meditation on loneliness in a film does not come without certain irony of the aesthetic and artistic kind, because there can hardly be any experience more solitary in itself than the cinema and the watching of films, completely different from book clubs and music shows.

But the transgression from the colors of tradition and the sounds of noise – urban and otherwise – into a reckless absence of dialogue and silence – without being a silent film – is very successful in placing the markers of experience on a level higher than it is normally given in casual conversation. The only other film comparable in experience and intensity to “Mirrors of Silence” is Alain Nasnas’ “Et si”, a Lebanese experimental film recently released but that has still not been featured in festivals.

Sontag concludes her “Aesthetics of Silence” with: “It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one’s assumptions can go unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by laugh that leaves one without any breath at all”. This is precisely what happens in Al-Janahi’s films; both despair and laugh leave one breathless and judgment is suspended, giving way to something very essential – and very loyal to the nature of films – in which the story itself becomes an obstacle.

His last film “Sea Shadows” (2011) premiered at Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year, being the first truly international full length motion picture from the United Arab Emirates. This film, very different in length and form to his previous work, falls under the normative “tradition” films genre from the Middle East and has been one of the most attended films in the United Arab Emirates. “Sea Shadows” will be a screened at the Gulf Film Festival on April 14.

Storytelling & Reconciliation: Isak Dinesen and Anna Banti

First published on HANNAH ARENDT CENTER

"It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the Day of Judgment”.

- Hannah Arendt, “Isak Dinesen: 1885 – 1963” in Men in Dark Times

According to Arendt, it is through action – and all action is but acts of speech – that human beings disclose themselves in their whoness rather than merely on the basis of their whatness. Her indebtedness for storytelling comes from a two-fold source: The Greek world on the one hand - the poets and the historians, and on the other the writings of Isak Dinesen.

Arendt devoted no theoretical effort to pass Dinesen under the lens of theory, other than some occasional mention and a literary profile in the book that Auden called her most German book – because of the form of epic legends in which the stories of the anti-heroes, under the shadow of dark times, are told.

Herself a talented storyteller, her books can be read better against this background of storytelling than on theoretical impetus; this is not because Arendt wasn’t a vehement defender of the life of the mind but because of her insight about the inability of intellectual traditions and history to understand and comprehend the events of her century.

Her reading of Dinesen conforms to the difficulties of understanding Totalitarianism. Spanish philosopher Fina Birulés puts in the following words: “While storytelling does not solve any problem and does not master anything forever, it adds yet another element in the repertory of the world, it is a way for human beings to leave a lasting presence in the world, not as species, but as a plurality of who’s”.

The relationship between storytelling and reconciliation is laid out by Arendt through Dinesen: “The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go: “When the storyteller is loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence”. To let go is an act of reconciliation.

Arendt writes the story of this anxiety and melancholy of her own through Dinesen: “That grief of having lost her life and lover in Africa should have made her a writer and given her a sort of second life was best understood as a joke, and “God loves a joke” became her maxim in the latter part of her life”.

Agnes Heller writes that Arendt knows in advance what it is that she wants to find in her storytelling, in spite of – often – finding something unexpected.

Dinesen becomes a reflection of mirrors for Arendt who in writing about Dinesen’s own storytelling that seems artificial and blurs the distinction between truth and fiction, finds the detachment necessary to comprehend the world, temporarily: “To become an artist also needs time and a certain detachment from the heavy, intoxicating business of sheer living that, perhaps, only the born artist can manage in the midst of living.”

The flight into imaginary worlds at the hand of Dinesen’s pen isn’t simply a performance and re-enactment of the Gothic – as is for example William Beckford’s “Vathek” – but rather a coming to terms with the present by telling a story about its burdens.

It is nothing but an anchoring on the present at a time when the foundation of the present itself – the past – seems irrevocably lost. A similar example of storytelling through mirrors would be, for example, Susan Sontag’s review of Anna Banti’s “Artemisia” for The London Review of Books in 2003.

“Artemisia” is a novel written late in the Second World War about the life of Artemisia Gentilenschi, a 17^th century Italian painter:  Banti, trained as an art historian, is meticulously careful about her treatment of sources on Gentilenschi’s life and writes in what Sontag calls “a double destiny”; according to her, Anna Banti does not find herself in Artemisia and is careful enough to write in the detachment of the third person, only available to the truly committed storyteller in a game of hide and seek: “We are playing a chasing game, Artemisia and I”.

More than a biography or a historical novel, Artemisia is a deeply emotional but sober and detached portrait of a woman in the early 17^th century, tainted by the scandal of a rape that disgraced her family and haunted no more  by her total commitment to art, than by the immense loneliness of living as an artist in a male-dominated world – but told with more grace than resentment.

The story about Banti and Artemisia that Sontag is telling is one of permanent displacement and loss; not only because of the female story being told but because the original novel was lost  under the ruins of Banti’s house in Borgo San Jacopo when the mines detonated by the Germans wrecked the houses near the river, including hers.

Without knowing as much, Susan Sontag is writing about Banti in the same way that Arendt is writing about Dinesen: Behind a story of loss and womanhood, there is an affirmative and rather reckless anchoring in the present – in Sontag’s case, the world after Totalitarianism: The Cold War, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. It is against this background that she is writing about a “phoenix of a novel”, which is in itself a testimony to Sontag’s own work.

What both writers learnt from their own writers is a bitter lesson in contemporary history, as eloquently put by Arendt about Dinesen:

Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art (as Goethe had done) or use it for the realization of an “idea”. Life might contain the “essence” (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the “elixir”; and eventually you may even be privileged to “make” something out of it, “to compound the story”. But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat it as such it will only play its tricks on you.

When Lebanese writer Mira Baz left Yemen in 2011, in the course of the revolution and just before the deadly “Friday of Dignity” massacre, after nearly a decade teaching and writing in the mysterious land – similar to Dinesen’s Africa seen through Arendt and Banti’s Florence seen through Sontag, a sort of paradise lost and not without heavy taxes levied by the status of paradise, she was to become displaced and would turn her poetic travelogue of Yemen into a vast vault of memory.

In March 2012 she wrote – exactly a year after the massacre – about the experience of the displacement, invoking the following lines from Dinesen:

“If I know a song of Africa,

Of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back,

Of the plows in the field and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers,

Does Africa know a song of me?”

After which she writes:

The house and the garden had quickly become my home, where in the mornings I fed my regular guests Bulbuls and Serins, and found serenity when, through watching them, I meditated on existence, on cycles, on life, on everything and nothingness. Out there was Yemen. Within the garden walls, and all the walls, was me, inside my head.

Through reading and writing, life cannot be changed, but it can be made understandable and livable, after the same fashion of John Updike when he described the prose of Bruno Schulz: “The harrowing effect of Schulz’ prose is to construct the world anew, as from fragments that exist after some unnamable disaster”. The disaster is always the turbulence of history and the unnamable is the loss, but here storytelling becomes a privilege, a sign of truth, and the burden of a presence – entering the world once again, even if it had been lost once.

Fina Birulés concludes her timely meditation on Arendt and Dinesen: “The political function of the narrator – historian or novelist – is to teach the acceptance of things as they are. From this acceptance, that might be called as well veracity, is born the faculty of judgment, by means of which, in words of Isak Dinesen, in the end we will have the privilege to see and to see again, and that is what is called Day of Judgment.”