[Reader-list] Ramallah - 2

[Monica Narula]

A culture under fire

Palestinian artists have suffered more than physical hardship - they 
have also had to deal with censorship, harassment, and the 
destruction of their work. In the third of a series of major articles 
on the intifada, William Dalrymple looks at the struggle to keep art 
alive in wartime

Wednesday October 2, 2002
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>The Guardian

It is never easy running an arts centre in a small provincial town. 
Overcoming indifference and getting the punters in, attracting good 
work and making ends meet - these are the problems faced by such 
places across the globe. What most arts administrators do not have to 
face is rampaging enemy troops, occupation, F-16 bombing runs, siege 
and curfews:

"The first time the Israeli army paid us a visit was at Easter," says 
Adila Laidi, the chic, French-educated 36-year-old who founded and 
runs the Sakakini cultural centre in central Ramallah. "Voilà! They 
broke in and trashed the place. Though peut-être we should be 
grateful they didn't actually blow it up."

In this they were relatively lucky. The previous day, on a visit to 
Bethlehem, I had seen a similar arts centre run by the Lutheran 
Church. The pastor had taken me around, showing how Israeli troops 
had completely smashed up the new $2m Lutheran centre, blowing up 
workshops, smashing windows and fax machines, shooting up 
photocopiers, and bringing down ceilings with explosive charges in an 
oddly pointless bout of thuggery that caused over half a million 
dollars' worth of damage. Compared to that, the Sakakini got off 
lightly, with permanent damage only to doors and computers.

Despite such trials - indeed, partly because of them - the Sakakini 
is an extraordinary place. Founded in 1988 on the wave of optimism 
that followed Oslo, it is a vibrant centre of Palestinian creativity, 
housed in a beautiful early 19th-century Ottoman villa made of stone 
the colour of feta cheese. It sits at the top of a hill in one of the 
more wealthy middle-class areas of Ramallah, surrounded by villas and 
bars and private schools. Upstairs there are spaces for poetry 
readings and film screenings, while downstairs there are a series of 
well-lit exhibition spaces. The energy of the place defies the 
stringent constraints imposed on it by the state of siege.

"It's difficult to do this work under constant curfews," admits 
Laidi, "though it is true that the occupation has provided some 
Palestinian artists with wonderful material." The ceramicist and 
installation artist Vera Tamari, who turns up for a chat in Laidi's 
office as we are speaking, is a case in point. Vera has spent half 
her life as an artist under Israeli occupation: "Up to Oslo, the 
Israelis used to monitor all our exhibitions. There were very few 
Palestinian art galleries, so we used to hold our shows in schools, 
churches, municipal halls - whatever was available. People piled in - 
students, labourers, political people, shepherds. It was so crowded 
that there was hardly any room to see the paintings. It was the first 
time in their lives that many of these people were seeing actual 
works of art. Their noses were rubbing against the paint as if they 
wanted to smell the oil. "It was very exciting, but the Israelis soon 
became aware of the importance of these exhibitions and started 
hitting the League of Palestinian Artists. They made us get permits 
to show our work, censoring art and invading artists' studios. 
Several of us were imprisoned, usually on charges that they were 
painting in the colours of the Palestinian flag. They would say, 'You 
can paint, but don't use red, white or black,' and they would 
imprison you if you used those colours. You couldn't paint a poppy, 
for example, or a watermelon: they were the wrong colours. Often it 
was up to the artistic judgment of the particular officer in charge."

The occupation has always lain at the heart of Tamari's art, but 
recently she found that the Easter incursion provided her with some 
unexpectedly rich subject-matter. When the Israeli tanks rolled into 
Ramallah, they made a point of trying to punish the Palestinian 
civilian population by destroying as many private cars as they could: 
"It was just a game to them," says Tamari. "Sheer bravado. The tank 
commanders would drive along the pavements rather than the roads, 
taking out as many cars as they could. Then they started driving up 
into people's drives and garages, wrecking anything they could find. 
For weeks afterwards, all these smashed-up cars were lying around: 
people kept them, hoping to sell bits of the engine, or perhaps the 
seats. They didn't want to face the fact that something so expensive 
was completely lost. Of course, there is no insurance for an act of 
war.

"A friend of mine had a little red Beetle that we used to go out for 
drives in. It was one of the cars that was destroyed, and when I saw 
it all smashed up with its legs in the air like some dead insect, I 
had the idea of making an installation with these cars. I got the PA 
to lay a stretch of tarmac on the edge of the El Bireh football field 
- a road symbolically going nowhere - and arranged the crushed cars 
in a line, as if in a traffic jam. We had a big party to open the 
exhibit - le tout Ramallah - and went home at midnight. "Then, at 
four that morning, the Israelis invaded again. My house was opposite 
the playing field and I could see the Israeli tanks passing. They 
would stop when they got to the installation, and you'd see these two 
heads pop out of their turrets and you could see them transfixed by 
this sight, trying to make sense of it. Eventually, after about a 
week, a whole cohort of Merkavas turned up and the tank commanders 
got out and discussed what to do. Then they got back into their tanks 
and ran over the whole exhibit, over and over again, backwards and 
forwards, crushing it to pieces. Then, for good measure, they shelled 
it. Finally they got out again and pissed on the wreckage. "I got the 
whole thing on video, and was delighted - of course. I have always 
been a great admirer of Duchamps. He had a nihilist-dadaist show in 
Paris once in the 1930s. And when they were putting it up, one of the 
workmen dropped a case of his paintings, smashing the glass. Duchamps 
was thrilled: 'Now it is complete,' he said. I felt exactly the same. 
The cars were now in tiny, tiny pieces. Before the second incursion I 
had had to make simulation tracks to mimic the path of the tanks. Now 
we had real ones. This was the ultimate metamorphosis for my work."

Across the corridor from Laidi's room is the office of Hassan Khader, 
a John Simpson lookalike who works as managing editor of al-Karmel, 
the leading Arabic literary magazine and the most prestigious arts 
journal in the Middle East. In style and typeface, the magazine is 
closely modelled on Granta: a thick, serious-looking paperback book 
with long prose articles interspersed with poems and grainy black and 
white photographs. Khader's office is piled high with papers and 
unopened Jiffy bags full of unread submissions. His desk is a sea of 
A4, though much of this relates to his other life as a translator: he 
greatly admires David Grossman's work and has translated his first 
novel into Arabic. Khader was born in Khan Yunus camp in Gaza in 
1953. Five years earlier his parents had lost everything - including 
their extensive ancestral landholdings - when his family was 
ethnically cleansed from their (now bulldozed) village of al-Jaladyah 
on the creation of Israel in 1948. But Hassan was a clever child, and 
a series of scholarships got him out of the camps and into university 
in Cairo. It was there that he made contact with the PLO, and before 
long he had risen to edit the PLO literary magazine. He continued to 
edit it throughout the siege of Beirut, as the Israelis pounded the 
offices with phosphorus shells. Compared with which, he says, 
bringing out al-Karmel under occupation is child's play. "When they 
broke in here at Easter, they knew the place was a cultural centre, 
but they still smashed it up. They broke open the door with 
explosives, destroyed all our computers, took all the hard disks. 
When the curfew was lifted, I came back to find papers all over the 
floor. They had upended all our filing cabinets and wandered back and 
forward over our latest proofs. There were the marks of jackboots all 
over our poetry."

Khader is a sociable sort, and his office is a beacon for the writers 
and novelists of the West Bank, several of whom dropped in for a chat 
as we were talking: Ramallah is under curfew so often these days that 
everyone seems to take the opportunity to get out and see friends on 
the few days the Israelis allow them to do so. While I am there, the 
talented Palestinian film-maker, Mai Masri, wanders through, 
discussing her latest project in the Ramallah camps, and five minutes 
later the novelist Yahia Yakhlef drops in for a cup of coffee. 
Together he and Khader sit bemoaning the state of the Ramallah 
bookshops. "The Israelis have always stopped books coming in from 
Jordan and they censor what they do allow in," says Khader. "It's 
almost impossible to get any decent novels in Ramallah these days." 
"The al-Shouq bookshop hasn't managed to get new stock for two 
years," adds Yakhlef. "There hasn't been a single delivery since the 
second intifada. Only cookbooks are left." "We all try to get around 
the problem by ordering stuff from Amazon," says Hassan, "but the 
Israelis still hold up deliveries for two or three months. You can't 
get anything until long after you have lost interest in it."

If Hassan is the man who does most of the daily grind of putting 
together al-Karmel, then the figurehead who started the magazine and 
whose name gives it its prestige is Mahmud Darwish, the most 
celebrated modern Arabic poet and the man who represents the apex of 
Palestinian artistic achievement. He has sold more than a million 
books of poetry and is such a hero in the Arab world that, when he 
gave a poetry reading in Beirut, they had to move the venue to a 
sports stadium: more than 25,000 people attended. Even in Ramallah, 
besieged as it is, he attracts capacity crowds of more than 1,000 
when he reads his work at the local Kassaba theatre. Darwish, a thin, 
handsome, articulate man of 60, was out of Ramallah during the 
incursion and was aghast when he found that the Sakakini had been 
trashed and that his manuscripts and poetry had been ransacked: "The 
Israelis wanted to give us a message that nobody and nothing is 
immune - including our cultural life," he says. "I took the message 
personally. I know they're strong and can invade and kill anyone. But 
they can't break or occupy my words. That is one thing they can't do. 
My poetry is the one way I have to resist them. I have to deal with 
this with the pen, not by stones."

Here he raises his hands in exasperation: "For us the tunnel is so 
dark that you cannot even see the light at the end. In a different 
situation I would like to give up my poetry about Palestine. I can't 
keep writing about loss and occupation for ever. I feel it deprives 
me of my freedom as a poet. Am I obliged to express my love for my 
country every day? You have to live for love, for freedom. The 
subject of occupation itself becomes a burden. I want, both as a poet 
and as a human being, to free myself from Palestine. But I can't. 
When my country is liberated, so shall I be. "When that happens, all 
Palestinian artists can go off and write about love and hope and all 
the other things in the world. But until that time, our duty is 
clear. We have no choice."

William Dalrymple's book, White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in 
18th-Century India is published next week by HarperCollins, price 
£19.99. He will be lecturing on the book at the Royal Geographical 
Society on Friday October 25. Tickets from Stanfords, 12-14 Long 
Acre, London WC2E 9LP. Tel: 020-7836 1321. See also 
<http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/>www.williamdalrymple.uk.com
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net