[Reader-list] Amin Maalouf

[Monica Narula]

The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15100

The New York Review of Books. April 11, 2002

Review
The Blood Lust of Identity

By Ian Buruma

In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Arcade, 164 pp., $22.95

Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America
by Tom Hayden
Verso, 312 pp., $25.00

1.

Identity is a bloody business. Religion, nationality, or race may not be the
primary causes of war and mass murder. These are more likely to be tyranny,
or greed for territory, wealth, and power. But "identity" is what gets the
blood boiling, what makes people do unspeakable things to their neighbors.
It is the fuel used by agitators to set whole countries on fire. When the
world is reduced to a battle between "us and them," Germans and Jews, Hindus
and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, Hutus and Tutsis, only mass murder
will do, for "we" can only survive if "they" are slaughtered. Before we kill
them, "they" must be stripped of our common humanity, by humiliating them,
degrading them, and giving them numbers instead of names.

The novelist Amin Maalouf begins his humane and eloquent essay[1] with the
question of "why so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of
religious, ethnic, national or some other kind of identity." Was it always
so? Or is there something new going on? What is new, I think, is not the
phenomenon itself so much as the scale of the damage. There is no easy or
single answer to Maalouf's question. He mentions various reasons why people
fear for their sense of belonging: globalization, the erosion of national
sovereignty, Western domination over the last three hundred years, the
collapse of failed secular regimes.

All these reasons deserve consideration, but none explains the extraordinary
bloodlust of identity warriors. Sadism must play a part. Once their basest
instincts are given the official nod, some people feel a sense of pleasure,
even liberation. The degradation of one's victims, stripped of their
identity, is a way to sooth one's conscience. This results in a ghastly
paradox: the more brutal the method of slaughter, the easier it is on the
killers, for the victims are no longer regarded as fully human.

But sadism cannot explain everything. Maalouf observes that mass murder can
seem entirely legitimate to people who feel that their community is under
threat. He writes: "Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they
are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and
dearest." It is difficult to imagine an SS man thinking this while feeding
Zyklon-B into the gas chambers of Treblinka, but it was indeed an essential
part of Nazi propaganda, and some Germans may have actually believed it,
including possibly Hitler himself-but then, from what we know, he didn't
really have any nearest and dearest.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the great demagogues of national identity
are themselves not always sure where they belong. Slobodan Milosevic's
family is from Montenegro. Hitler was an Austrian. This suggests that
Maalouf may be too optimistic when he claims that people with multiple
identities will never be "on the side of the fanatics." On the contrary,
purity is often the compulsive aim of those who feel they have to make up
for their complexity. But he is right that we are all made up of a mixture
of loyalties and identifications, regional, linguistic, religious, ethnic,
national, social, or professional. The ingredients in these mixes can shift
with time. Sometimes they disappear altogether, or reappear in grotesque
forms. At a literary gathering in San Francisco, I met a distinguished
writer from Yugoslavia. In an attempt to break the ice, I asked her whether
she was Serb or Croat. She answered me courteously, but with a hint of
impatience at my crass ignorance: "I am a Yugoslav. In Yugoslavia, we don't
think in those categories anymore." This was in 1990.

Circumstances can make the ingredients of individual identities conflict, or
click in unexpected ways. A grand lady in the former Portuguese colony of
Goa, who grew up speaking Portuguese, Goan, Hindi, and English, described
herself to me as a Roman Catholic Brahmin. It struck me as curious that a
Christian would still be so conscious of her Hindu caste. Then she explained
that in the colonial past Christians had a special need to protect their
Indian identity from Portuguese encroachment, and so caste consciousness
grew even stronger.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amin Maalouf is himself a good example of cultural, national and religious
complication. He was born in Lebanon, as a Greek Orthodox Christian among
Muslims, his mother tongue is Arabic, but he lives in Paris and writes in
French. All these elements of his identity are shared by many, but the
particular mix is what makes him an individual. His may be an especially
rich brew. But the same principle applies to everyone. It is when we take
one single element and make it absolute that the trouble begins. This tends
to happen, as Maalouf writes, when we feel that our identity, or part of it,
is under attack. My own experience confirms this. I am part British, part
Dutch; Dutch Anglophobia makes me feel British; British disdain of Holland
makes me feel Dutch. This is a low-intensity issue, however; murder, as yet,
has not entered my mind.

Some British-born Muslims, on the other hand, felt strongly enough about
their Islamic identity to go and kill infidels in Afghanistan, even if they
were fellow British citizens. These holy warriors were no longer able to do
as Maalouf advocates, and give the various parts of their mix equal weight.
For them, Islam became absolute. To draw general conclusions from such cases
is risky. Young people, especially in marginal communities, can be swayed by
agitators for highly personal reasons: a never-forgotten childhood slight, a
sexual rejection, a yearning for significance, or just the adolescent blend
of confusion and ennui.

Again, Maalouf is less concerned with such personal matters than with the
bigger historical picture. He points out that the superior might of the West
has put great strains on non-Westerners. Scientific discovery, political
freedoms, economic enterprise, and imperial aggression combined to make much
of the non-Western world feel peripheral to the European metropole. To match
the Western powers, others had no choice but to take up Western ways. Even
those who did so with success, such as the Japanese, felt a sense of
humiliation. The break with the past was too abrupt. The foreign graft did
not always take. Nerves are still raw even now. Those who did not succeed
feel as if they live, as Maalouf puts it, "in a world which belongs to
others and obeys rules made by others, a world where they are orphans,
strangers, intruders or pariahs.... What can be done to prevent some of them
feeling they have been bereft of everything and have nothing more to lose,
so that they come, like Samson, to pray to God for the temple to collapse on
top of them and their enemies alike?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another word, today, for Western domination is "globalization," and
globalization is often used as another word for "US imperialism." Maalouf
takes the fears of globalization seriously. After all, as he says, the
French are almost as defensive about their identity in the face of
Hollywood, Microsoft, and Big Macs as non-Europeans. What is needed, then,
is "a new concept of identity." Perhaps so, but Maalouf is a little vague
about what that concept might be. It should be mixed, and never absolute. We
should feel part of our countries, and of "Europe," or even the world.
Religion must be personal and "kept apart from what has to do with
identity." I'm not sure all this is possible. One can feel British or French
and "European," but not quite in the same way, since Europe is not a
sovereign entity; neither, of course, is the world. And religion is hard to
detach from identity, since identification with a community of believers is
part of the religious appeal. I also wonder whether the symbols of
Coca-Colonization matter as much as some people think. For the places with
the greatest troubles-Afghanistan, Chechnya, Algeria-are the least affected
by American commerce. The Thais in Bangkok or the Chinese in Hong Kong are
not up in arms against the West. Poor Pakistanis are, but they may never
have gone near a Big Mac.

Maalouf states that many people see globalization as a threat to their
"culture, identity and values." This is certainly true of disaffected
intellectuals, not just in the old colonial peripheries, but especially in
the West itself. Yet I wonder how many ordinary Chinese, Indians, Zambians,
or even French really fret about their identity and values because of global
trade. It seems more likely that the wellsprings of religious or ethnic
fanaticism are political more than cultural. Fanaticism has to do with a
lack of representation or free speech. Either can lead to an impotent rage.
Maalouf sounds a bit absolutist himself in his stress on the right to speak
one's native language. This is indeed an important right. More important,
however, is the right to speak freely at all, never mind in which language.

Modernization in the non-Western world has come to mean Westernization. True
enough. But there are different roads to the West. The liberal democratic
option is a threat to old or new elites who wish to wield absolute power.
This is why variations of fascism or communism have been more alluring to
power-holders or power-grabbers in the developing world. Much of the
religious fanaticism we see today comes from the failure of autocratic
secular states such as Egypt. Maalouf recognizes this: "Secularism without
democracy is a disaster for democracy and secularism alike."

Islamism in Egypt or Algeria came in the wake of failed state socialism.
This has nothing to do with globalization, US imperialism, or Coca-Cola. To
be sure, US governments have supported religious fundamentalists against the
Soviet Empire, and continue to support some authoritarian regimes. But the
failure of democracy in Arab countries, or indeed Asian ones, cannot
primarily be blamed on Washington or global trade. In fact, pro-Western
countries in the non-Western world which are most exposed to global trade
are often-not always-the most democratic too. Religious fanaticism comes
when politics break down. The same is true of racial or nationalist
fanaticism and revolutionary millenarianism, which are all variations of
religious zeal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The furnace of antiglobalism is actually not in the so-called third world,
but in Europe. This, too, has something to do with the lack of
representation. We live in democracies. But to many citizens, European
institutions and multinational corporations appear to be wielding more power
than elected national governments. The problem can be overstated, by British
Euro-skeptics as much as by anticapitalist agitators, but it cannot be
dismissed. Whatever it is, or will be, the EU is not a democratic
federation; multinational corporations are both indisputably powerful and
undemocratic. But here we are in a tricky bind, for one of the
justifications for closer European integration is precisely the capacity to
check the power of big business.

Another reason for a European sense of impotence is the utter dependency for
its security on the US. This, and the huge success of US commercial
enterprise, makes Europeans feel more and more peripheral. As is true in the
non-West, this doesn't affect the average consumer of Coca-Colonization so
much as artists and intellectuals, who see it as their role to define,
guard, and express "identity," be it regional, national, or spiritual. This
is why Hollywood is seen as such a threat, especially in France; it has
swamped our markets and invaded our histories. It has, in the words of a
character in an early Wim Wenders film, "colonized our minds."

In a way, non-Americans are in the position of Germans at the time of
Napoleon's greatest victories. France was dominant not only in arts and
culture, but in military affairs. What was most annoying to German poets and
thinkers was France's claim to universality. French values were universal
values. Similar claims are being made for America today. There are several
ways outsiders can react. They can follow alternative forms of universalism,
such as communism or Islamism. They can retreat into romantic nativism,
celebrating the national soul, and so on. Or they can boost their confidence
by expanding their political freedoms, and taking more responsibility for
themselves. There are instances of all three in recent history. But the last
decade has shown how often believers can switch their creeds without losing
any of their zeal. Some revolutionary socialists began as fervent Catholics,
only to become rabid nativists. Amin Maalouf may not have all the answers to
such dangers, but he is a rare voice of sanity in this murderous discord.

2.

Maalouf does not go into this, but some of the worst instances of romantic
nativism and identity chatter occur in the heart of the metropole itself.
Tom Hayden was born in Wisconsin. His great-grandparents were immigrants
from Ireland. His parents craved and achieved conventional, midwestern,
middle-class American respectability. They attended the Catholic Church but
only because it was what they were expected to do. Hayden reacted in the
manner of some other sons of respectable American folks: he became a 1960s
rebel, was a founder of SDS, led protests against the Vietnam War, marched
for civil rights, was one of the Chicago Seven, became a California
legislator, and married a movie star. He was far more prominent than most,
but, apart from marrying Jane Fonda, his life path was not all that
unconventional for a man of his generation.

Then, in 1968, roughly twenty years before the Soviet Empire collapsed and
former Communists, such as Slobodan Milosevic, became nationalists, Hayden,
in his own phrase, had "an epiphany," and "discovered that [he] was Irish on
the inside." The moment of revelation came in Northern Ireland, while he was
watching marchers sing "We Shall Overcome." Epiphany developed into a case
of full-blown blood-and-soil nationalism, precisely the kind of thing German
poets and thinkers adopted to resist the preeminence of France. All the
clichés of the genre are there in Hayden's account. He quotes various Irish
sages to the effect that Irish culture is very ancient, older in fact "than
the English or even imperial Roman cultures." The Irish soul, filled with
mysticism and "otherworldliness that challenge modernity," is "like an
ancient forest." (Such woody imagery is always a giveaway for neo-Wagnerian
passions.)

Hayden's inner Irishman is particularly stirred ("my blood still heats
involuntarily") by the poets of national soul who celebrate violent
rebellions. One such, Patrick Pearse, wrote a famous funeral ode to
O'Donovan Rossa, leader of an armed campaign against the British in the
1880s. Hayden writes: "I was touched by Pearse's summoning of a mystical
courage, rooted in an ancient heroic tradition, so lacking in the world I
inhabited."[2] The subject of Hayden's admiration, Pearse, was a religious
fanatic, who saw Ireland's fate in messianic terms: ancestral ghosts had to
be appeased with bloody sacrifice.[3] As it happens, Pearse was the son of
an English father and Irish mother; so much for Maalouf's confidence in the
natural tolerance fostered by multiple identities.

The unheroic boredom of American affluence drives the reborn Irishman to the
old sod once more, where, haunted by ancestral traumas, Hayden sits at the
feet of hard men from the IRA, whose every appearance in his book is a cue
for haloes to glow in the dark. There, in the glass-strewn streets of Derry
or Belfast with the smell of cordite in his florid Irish nose, Hayden feels
he can finally live up to his name. Hayden, we learn, is from Ó hAodain,
which means "the person of the flame."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, why would a successful American wish to become an Irish fanatic? Or,
put in another way, why would an activist of the New Left adopt all the
romantic clichés of the Old Right? Perhaps there is a parallel here with the
collapse of the Soviet Empire. Socialist communitarianism, never a winner in
the US, was an utterly lost cause by the 1980s. After 1989 the dream was
dead. Identity politics, which began with Black Power in the 1960s, began
more and more to replace it. Assimilation was the enemy now, the domestic
version of US imperialism. Hayden claims that non-WASPs who aspire to become
mainstream Americans are self-hating and in deep denial about their "stolen
identities," like colonial subjects trying to be like their white masters.
Much of the book is about his own efforts to shed the "trauma" of
assimilation, and to convince himself and his readers that to be Irish is to
be nonwhite. Already by page twelve, Hayden has yoked the fate of the Irish
to those of the Jews and African-Americans. They had the Holocaust and
slavery. The Irish had the Famine. Hayden lobbied to get the Famine included
in Californian social science textbooks, for then "our trauma would be
recognized alongside those of African Americans, the Jews, the Armenians,
and others who had demanded a place in classroom texts."

The history of the Famine should be among the subjects taught in school, but
this jockeying for a place in the charts of victimhood is not only unseemly
but also deeply narcissistic. It is really all about "me," the Person of the
Flame, drinking alcohol "to fill a void in my soul that assimilation had
caused," and "me" recovering my "Irish (or racial) identity" from "forced
amnesia through the experience of suffering." Hayden, in his vulgar Freudian
angst, actually sounds more like a bored Californian than a poor, suffering
Irishman. He also does precisely what Maalouf deplores, which is to give
absolute priority to just one aspect of his personal identity. When Hayden
applies it to others, this tendency is even more extreme. He claims that Che
Guevara had an "Irish soul" because of his Irish great-grandfather. As Conor
Cruise O'Brien said: "Irish cultural nationalism is a rum business: probably
the rummest form of cul-tural nationalism that has ever existed
anywhere."[4]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

What does Irishness mean in this peculiar fantasyland? This is where things
get seriously muddled. Not only does Hayden reduce complex identities to an
Irish soul, but he jams his Irishness into a very narrow box. He becomes
"painfully aware that all my innermost thoughts and verbal communications
were in the language of my colonizer." So he has a stab at Gaelic: "How
could one fight for 'Irish identity' without including the ancient
language...?" Well, indeed. Alas, however, this was a battle already fought
and lost more than a hundred years ago. And Gaelic was in any case too much
of a bother for Hayden to learn. So thank goodness that the greatest Irish
writers of the twentieth century all wrote in the tongue of the oppressor.

Hayden's Irish soul really comes down to two things: the trauma of the
Famine, and the conflict in Northern Ireland, which, in his view, is simply
a continuation of the heroic war against the ancient English foe. The
historic Irish sages and rebels who fired Hayden's imagination are
reincarnated in the likes of Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams. Irishmen such
as Conor Cruise O'Brien, who hold more skeptical views of the sectarian
battles, are dismissed as "self-hating" patsies of the colonial power.
Irish-Americans who have similar doubts are also deemed to have trampled on
their Irish souls. Hayden, then, is like those Jewish Americans who denounce
every Jew with reservations about Ariel Sharon as a self-hater. Or,
conversely, like those bigots everywhere who believe that Jews cannot be
patriots, since their only loyalty is to God's chosen tribe.

I wonder, also, where this leaves the rest of us, especially in the US? If
our true selves are shaped by ancestral traumas and ancient feuds, what
about a person whose veins contain Scottish, English, and Polish blood?
Should he or she mourn the dead of Culloden one day, curse the Russians on
the next, and toast the Queen on Sunday? Is a Roosevelt only true to himself
if he remembers the Spanish oppressing the Dutch? Should Donald Rumsfeld be
celebrating his German soul, with Fichte and the Meistersinger providing a
chorus against the French? And I had always thought the main reason so many
people flocked to America was to be rid of such nonsense.

To reduce a nationality (for what else can Irishness be, except to a
racist?) to a sectarian political cause is grotesque. But it is Hayden's use
of Northern Ireland as the playground for his own psychodrama that is truly
revolting. Much of the book is devoted to several trips to the windy
battlefronts of the North. One of his aims is to show his young son, Troy
O'Donovan Garity, his "roots." Troy, named after an Irish rebel and a
Vietnamese who plotted to kill Robert MacNamara, is taught to fear the
British enemy as part of his education. Approaching an army checkpoint, he
cries out: "Dad, don't call me Irish because the soldiers will shoot me."
His proud dad notes: "He was learning that his roots could get him killed."

And consider, for a moment, the following sentences from Hayden's account of
his identity tourism. It is 1976. Hayden and Troy are in Belfast:

There were 180 shooting incidents that month in Belfast, according to the
Republican News.... At the same time, my own personal war with assimilation
was going well. West Belfast was where Irish identity was being contested
and reclaimed. Troy was face to face with his heritage.

"My own personal war...," Troy's "heritage"...Adams and McGuiness may be
hard men with a violent past, but they deserve better than this. There is
more at stake in Northern Ireland than "identity." If it were only about
identity, the conflict really would be insoluble, for if the republicans
should be true to their Irish roots, why should the Loyalists not be equally
true to their British roots? Or is Hayden suggesting that they go back to
the land of their ancestors, which for many of them would be Scotland? In
fact, the conflict is as much about social discrimination as it is about
religion or political rights. How to find a political solution which
safeguards the interests of the Catholic minority as well as the Protestants
is extremely difficult. To see it as a colonial war, as Hayden does, which
would be solved as soon as the hated enemy goes home, is naive at best, and
dangerous at worst. But one doesn't have to be a Sinn Fein sympathizer to
regard the treatment of their battles as a form of personal therapy for
American visitors as an insult.

If the main problems with Hayden's brand of romanticism were bad history and
woolly politics (he contrives to enlist his battles over the Irish soul in
today's fashionable struggles with multinationals and globalization), this
would make the author look foolish, but that would be that. In fact, his
thinking, or rather, his feeling, is more lethal. It is exactly what
justifies violence in the name of identity. Like his hero, Patrick Pearse,
Hayden is haunted by bloodthirsty ghosts. He is not alone. There are Sikhs
in Toronto, Muslims in Britain and France, Jews in Brooklyn, and many others
in far-flung places who seek to sooth ancestral voices by encouraging
barbarism far from home. Some are prepared to die for their causes. Most are
content to let others do the dying, while they work on their identities at
home.

Notes

[1] This is also a tribute to the translator, Barbara Bray.

[2]All this talk of soul, mystical heroism, and higher causes smacks of what
Avishai Margalit and I termed "Occidentalism" in an earlier article in these
pages; see The New York Review, January 17, 2002. It is one more indication
that Occidentalism has no geographical boundaries.

[3] Before an anti-British rebellion in 1916, Pearse wrote that Irish
suffering reminded him of King David's aspiration: "That thy foot may be
dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and that the tongue of thy dogs may be
red through the same."

[4] Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in
Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1994), p. 87.
-- 
Monica Narula
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