[Reader-list] more Disorientation

[rehan ansari]

DisORIENTation visited
   By: Rehan Ansari 
   March 31, 2003 
One week into the US invasion of Iraq, the festival of
contemporary Arab artists called DisORIENTation that I
attended in Berlin last week, is becoming more
memorable.

Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist gave the keynote
address at the start of the festival, which coincided
with the bombing. He invoked Emile Zola, a Jewish
writer from the 19th Century who wrote the essay
‘J’accuse’ accusing his government of anti-semitism.
Today, Khoury said, I accuse the US of imperialism and
racism.

Jesus! It’s true, the US is acting more imperial than
the East India Company! Who would have thought that a
power so supreme would condescend to such bare-faced
brutality.

In New York when I tell people in classrooms, living
rooms and bars that that this is an imperial war, the
term imperial leaves them unmoved. 

They understand the concept technically, not
emotionally. Everybody agrees the invasion of Iraq is
an imperial act since US is protecting its interests.
But so what, the US does a lot of things in its
interest. They are disturbed when I say an imperialist
is a racist. Racism is something they know. 

But I can call these American acts in Iraq worse
names. 

In Berlin Nazi history stares you in the face:
imperialists are racists, only a racist would think it
natural to destroy and then ‘reconstruct’. Moreover,
imperialists with the technology for mass murder
(Tomahawk missiles and 25,000 pound bombs) are Nazis.

Khoury, in his speech, also lamented the despots of
the Middle East. Saddam is a monster. 
You would have to be irrational to fight US armies. He
will lay waste to his villages and cities and send all
his people to their death. He is doing it and
succeeding in making the US army pause and take stock.

They don’t know whether to move on or wait for
reinforcements. And next week begins summer in the
desert. It’s as if Saddam has been waiting for this
fight all his life. How perfectly mad of him!
A normal dictator, like our Musharraf, wags his tail
to a Colin Powell phone call. With their war the
jehadi Christians and Jews in the State Department,
Pentagon and the White House that are Cheney, Bush,
Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Perle have made an old school
Arab nationalist and despot (was there ever any other
kind?) into an anti-imperialist. In fact this stupid
war will make Osama, the fundamentalist, an 
anti-imperialist as well. 

Elia Sulieman, the filmmaker from Palestine and maker
of the terrific feature film Divine Intervention (it
won at Cannes), present at the festival referred to
the war and said: ‘‘Sadly, we are all Palestinians
now.’’

One week after Suleiman made that comment Basra, Najf,
Kif, Karbala all resemble West Bank and Gaza, where
American made Israelis tanks, helicopter and F-16s
fight Palestinian militia in ruined neighbourhoods.
In the last scene of Divine Intervention we see the
hero and his mother sitting across the room from a
pressure cooker going berserk hissing on the stove.
They keep sitting, keep watching with bored, deadpan
expressions.

The House of World Culture in Berlin, which houses
this festival, is a German institution that is not
interested in archiving or otherwise instituting
national art. 

They came up with a idea called DisORIENTation and
gave artists from places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
Egypt, Palestine, space, money and three years (!) to
produce art. 

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art is
salivating over exhibitions around Picasso and
Matisse. 

One afternoon as I sat at a table with some of these
artists I realised that I knew nothing at all about
everyday life in their cities: Damascus, Cairo,
Ramallah, Amman. When I said that to Moataz Nasr, a
visual artist from Cairo, he said: “Too bad for you.”

It’s worse for Americans, who are fighting a war with
people it is very clear they don’t know, nor care to
know.



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