Levantine Review September 2010 Issue
http://www.levantinecenter.org/arts/authors/poetic-theologies%E2%80%94-passing-tony-judt-mahmoud-darwish
by Farid Farid
One of Mahmoud Darwish's most memorable lines is "there is on this earth, what makes life worth living." The illocutionary profundity and sentimental beatitude captured in this line by the national poet of Palestine rings truer today more than ever in a world afflicted with moral bankruptcy and ethical corruption. The now finite fragrant poetry and prose of Darwish, who sadly passed away two years ago on 9th August, was one of the epicurean pleasures to be savoured as a reader. The carefully constructed stanzas and meandering rhythms were at once intellectually gratifying and spiritually nourishing. In his posthumous collection, The Butterfly's Burden, Darwish's elegant poems are prophetic as ever but also heart wrenching in their evocative descriptions of his beloved occupied homeland of Palestine.
Darwish was born in 1941 in al Birwah-a village that had fallen to Zionist forces in their establishment of a newly independent state in 1948. His complex picturing of human nature was not tainted by his experiences as an unwanted refugee in Israel. Darwish maintained a critical sense of justice without losing perspective of the innate humanity of those whom he shared the land with albeit in unequal arrangements. He once commented "I will continue to humanize even the enemy... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings." And it is precisely this humanistic philosophy that elevated him as a deified cultural figure within the rich literary annals of the Middle Eastern world. His quiet charisma and sonorous intonations galvanized populations to his secular theology of peace predicated on an unflinchingly poetic disposition. From his landmark first poem "Record I am An Arab" to his hauntingly last presence on screen for a production on Ibsen called "Identity of the Soul," Darwish enunciates a celestial monologue that shatters borders, that conflagrates an confirms common sense, that delicately speaks and appeals to all those who shriek when suffering and to those ears that are comforted by a talismanic historian of life narrating his displaced identity.
On the same pantheon of public intellectuals also stood Tony Judt, whose sobering voice crying form the obfuscating wilderness of political machinations and spin will be deeply missed. Judt died on 6th August, 2010 from ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease. In the ensuing days, there have been generous obituaries from leading transatlantic luminaries gracing major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian. It seems ironic yet almost prophetic that Judt was born in such a momentous historic year in 1948 in the southside of London to Lithuanian Jewish émigré parents.
Judt's lucid prose was informed by an acute awareness of the inner reverberations of political events such as the revolutionary spirit sweeping across Paris and Prague in 1968. His analytical acumen and elegance as an essayist were on full display in his long affiliation writing for the New York Review of Books for nearly two decades on every conceivable topic from girls to the United Nations and everything between Marxism and George W. Bush.
But his greatest contribution to historical scholarship was his wide ranging analysis of Europe post World War II. His magnum opus, Postwar, stands at 900 pages as a collated testament to his previous works that were concerned with the nexus of knowledge and power in the formation of political ideologies in Eastern and Western Europe. He excoriated the lackadaisical political engagement of the French Left without losing sight of the mendacity of the right-wing ideologies that mobilized vulnerable masses.
He embodied the public intellectual whose lion-hearted stance on the question of Israel & Palestine earned him rebuke and much heartache from Zionist apologists where he was shunned because of his principles.
"I'm struck when I observe the Jewish community in the United States, especially in New York," said Tony Judt last [October], sitting cross-legged in his Washington Square Park apartment, "that it's a community which is the most successful, the wealthiest, the most well-integrated, the most influential, the most safe Jewish community in the history of Judaism, period-anywhere, anytime-since the Roman Empire. And yet it's driven by an enormous self-induced insecurity." —The New York Observer
In his elegiac last book published before he died, Ill Fares The Land, Judt agitates for and ponders a future that is beyond "the materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life." He constantly challenged the status quo of apathetic citizenship in western democracies and in his final posthumous essay he implores toward a alternative political theology of listening. In recounting his undergraduate days at Kings' College and his meaningful encounters with a generation of critical intellectuals he nostalgically riffs "the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect, that is teaching...the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting opinions across a broad political spectrum."
For these two towering figures fused by a shared history of oppression, a corporeal relation to a scarred land and an unflinching sense of intellectual and moral integrity, their words will certainly be heard and debated by many apologists and detractors for many years to come because they were ultimately worth something.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Manual to a Massacre - A poem for Palestine
Manual to a Massacre
To those suspended in the salty waters of life roaming in a sea of oblivion, please be aware that the floating devices of death could implode your integrity and steadfast passion for justice into splattered shards and debased debris of internecine intentions used for Israeli Defence Force (IDF) investigations. Effigies burning lacerated bodies on seashores are wounded marks that delineate dissolving territories into nihilistic waves of a dead sea. The following jingoistic terms will clarify the proper rules of engagement that conflagrate international law:
Palestinians – a people who wait.
Gaza - non place on a road map to nowhere.
Flotilla – historically a Spanish warship. Currently, a buoyant rusty shed of humanitarian refuse housing broken wheelchairs that transport paralysed senses and delicately mute figurines. Contrary to other definitions put forward by (Ha)Bibi, it is definitely a love boat.
IDF Commandos – most moral of men to embrace violence professionally in their coarse veins converting citizens of dual nationalities (i.e. Australian) into necropolitical narcissists.
Mavi Marmara – blue marble stone that turns to red with infusions of haemorrhaging haemoglobin and transfusions of deadly detritus.
Apartheid – not just a South African phenomenon of politicide, nor a state of exception but an ultimate state of fallen disgrace.
Poetry – to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, to write poetry after Deir Yassin is tragic.
Writing – a crippled labour in the face of the ineluctability of limbs flailing, people waiting, mothers wailing, moral barricading and prolonged moments of agitating over words... that are ultimately failing.
Justice – impossible in its promise to come.
Irony – sorely needed in these times.
Palestine – more than just a cause.
Farid Farid
04/06/10
To those suspended in the salty waters of life roaming in a sea of oblivion, please be aware that the floating devices of death could implode your integrity and steadfast passion for justice into splattered shards and debased debris of internecine intentions used for Israeli Defence Force (IDF) investigations. Effigies burning lacerated bodies on seashores are wounded marks that delineate dissolving territories into nihilistic waves of a dead sea. The following jingoistic terms will clarify the proper rules of engagement that conflagrate international law:
Palestinians – a people who wait.
Gaza - non place on a road map to nowhere.
Flotilla – historically a Spanish warship. Currently, a buoyant rusty shed of humanitarian refuse housing broken wheelchairs that transport paralysed senses and delicately mute figurines. Contrary to other definitions put forward by (Ha)Bibi, it is definitely a love boat.
IDF Commandos – most moral of men to embrace violence professionally in their coarse veins converting citizens of dual nationalities (i.e. Australian) into necropolitical narcissists.
Mavi Marmara – blue marble stone that turns to red with infusions of haemorrhaging haemoglobin and transfusions of deadly detritus.
Apartheid – not just a South African phenomenon of politicide, nor a state of exception but an ultimate state of fallen disgrace.
Poetry – to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, to write poetry after Deir Yassin is tragic.
Writing – a crippled labour in the face of the ineluctability of limbs flailing, people waiting, mothers wailing, moral barricading and prolonged moments of agitating over words... that are ultimately failing.
Justice – impossible in its promise to come.
Irony – sorely needed in these times.
Palestine – more than just a cause.
Farid Farid
04/06/10
Friday, July 9, 2010
Egypt's atrocities can't be hidden forever
Egypt's atrocities can't be hidden forever
FARID FARID
January 13, 2010
Comments 26
In his mainstream best seller The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown fuses fact and fiction in a panoply of adventure-riddled conversations and quasi-mythical fabulations. However, he correctly – albeit fleetingly, mentions the small town of Nag Hammadi about 65 kilometres from Luxor in Egypt as the site where the Gnostic Gospels were discovered. Brown, within the narrative of the novel, reveals that these "lost gospels" compiled allegedly by St Thomas ultimately hold the clues to Christianity's aversion to the feminine divine and the source of its fragility by not addressing the Freudian sexual ghosts present in its formation as a world religion. However, Brown's Western-centric beef with the Catholic Church ends up ignoring the continuous indigenous history of Coptic Christianity present since Mark the Apostle's arrival in Egypt and other repressed ghosts lurking behind religion and politics.
It was at Nag Hammadi that eight Coptic youth and a security official were murdered in a drive-by shooting by extremist Muslim gunmen after they had just celebrated the midnight Orthodox Christmas Eve mass. Government officials suspect that the attack, where gunmen haphazardly started shooting at a crowd injuring many, was in retaliation for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Coptic man in the town in November. The spill over from the attacks has resulted in riots and arrests that have engulfed Christian and Muslim communities in a wave of sectarian passions. These aggressive acts in poor rural towns in southern Egypt have been common in recent years and the ferocity of sectarian violence has recently escalated in larger metropolises such as in Alexandria last year.
However, these latest attacks need to be contextualised beyond the facile claims of sectarian carnage. Coptic Christians are the indigenous peoples of Egypt and have been maintaining their traditions, rites and customs since the 1st century despite centuries of repression under Roman and Muslims rulers. They represent about 10 per cent of Egypt's 80 million people and generally have co-existed along with their Muslim compatriots in an atmosphere of tense yet liveable amicability. Yet, with the decades of governmental oppression and quashing of civil liberties since the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser and extending to the current policies of President Hosni Mubarak and corruption on local levels, cadres of Islamic extremists have sprung up to retaliate and restore a more equitable social order through a brutal mix of lethality and religious misinterpretations.
In most cases of these hostilities, the victims have been Coptic Christians due to a combination of reasons. Coptic Christians are a minority and within the psyche of the state they remain problematic in terms of citizenship because of their religious status as the largest non-Sunni Muslim minority along with other discriminated minorities such as Bahai's, Yezidis, Catholics etc. Moreover, within daily Egyptian popular representations, Copts are stereotypically seen as elitist and bourgeois because of their economic leverage through entrepreneurial successes of Coptic businessmen such as Naguib Sawires – the founder of Orascom, the biggest telecommunications network in the Middle East and Africa.
The fundamentalist voices of some Copts living in the West, especially the US and Canada, pressuring Western governments to interfere in Egyptian domestic politics, leads to a scenario where Copts in Egypt are seen as Western colluders and in turn bear the brunt of disgruntled local elements as well as blatant institutional discrimination. Nonetheless, these depictions do not fully explain why these violent incidents persist.
As renowned anthropologist Arjun Appadurai succinctly explains in his book The Fear of Small Numbers : "the existence of even the smallest minority within national boundaries is seen as an intolerable deficit in the purity of the national whole . . . Minorities being a reminder of this small but frustrating deficit, thus unleash the urge to purify."
The predominantly rural south of Egypt has historically languished through mismanaged policies of economic advancement of various governments and has been depicted as racially and technologically backward in Egyptian and Western popular imaginations.
The demographic make-up of towns such as Nag Hammadi have large minorities pitted against each other where Christians and Muslims roughly represent the same number of inhabitants but political power resides with corrupt local authorities intent on subverting any notion of justice. The climate of economic disenfranchisement in these towns plus the venomous diatribes of some extremist religiously untrained Muslim clerics presents a fertile ground for young Muslims – especially men – to express their rage in violent ways.
The Egyptian Government is complicit in trying to present a picture of religious harmony to allay Western fears of human right violations but the ugliness and fissures of these local disputes dispel the cosmetic attempts of a cowardly government dealing with its domestic politics and its international image especially in relation to Gaza.
In an interview broadcast on Egyptian national TV a few hours before this fateful incident, the head of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, urged a return to the ideals of the 1919 Revolution against British colonial occupation. He implored Egyptians to a secularist ethics of citizenship based on mutual respect for difference beyond the dead-end of religious labelling. It is these wise words that must be heeded now more than ever for Nag Hammadi not to continue being a site where ghosts continue to dwell.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney. His research deals with the politics of exile, race and religion.
Source: theage.com.au
FARID FARID
January 13, 2010
Comments 26
In his mainstream best seller The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown fuses fact and fiction in a panoply of adventure-riddled conversations and quasi-mythical fabulations. However, he correctly – albeit fleetingly, mentions the small town of Nag Hammadi about 65 kilometres from Luxor in Egypt as the site where the Gnostic Gospels were discovered. Brown, within the narrative of the novel, reveals that these "lost gospels" compiled allegedly by St Thomas ultimately hold the clues to Christianity's aversion to the feminine divine and the source of its fragility by not addressing the Freudian sexual ghosts present in its formation as a world religion. However, Brown's Western-centric beef with the Catholic Church ends up ignoring the continuous indigenous history of Coptic Christianity present since Mark the Apostle's arrival in Egypt and other repressed ghosts lurking behind religion and politics.
It was at Nag Hammadi that eight Coptic youth and a security official were murdered in a drive-by shooting by extremist Muslim gunmen after they had just celebrated the midnight Orthodox Christmas Eve mass. Government officials suspect that the attack, where gunmen haphazardly started shooting at a crowd injuring many, was in retaliation for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Coptic man in the town in November. The spill over from the attacks has resulted in riots and arrests that have engulfed Christian and Muslim communities in a wave of sectarian passions. These aggressive acts in poor rural towns in southern Egypt have been common in recent years and the ferocity of sectarian violence has recently escalated in larger metropolises such as in Alexandria last year.
However, these latest attacks need to be contextualised beyond the facile claims of sectarian carnage. Coptic Christians are the indigenous peoples of Egypt and have been maintaining their traditions, rites and customs since the 1st century despite centuries of repression under Roman and Muslims rulers. They represent about 10 per cent of Egypt's 80 million people and generally have co-existed along with their Muslim compatriots in an atmosphere of tense yet liveable amicability. Yet, with the decades of governmental oppression and quashing of civil liberties since the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser and extending to the current policies of President Hosni Mubarak and corruption on local levels, cadres of Islamic extremists have sprung up to retaliate and restore a more equitable social order through a brutal mix of lethality and religious misinterpretations.
In most cases of these hostilities, the victims have been Coptic Christians due to a combination of reasons. Coptic Christians are a minority and within the psyche of the state they remain problematic in terms of citizenship because of their religious status as the largest non-Sunni Muslim minority along with other discriminated minorities such as Bahai's, Yezidis, Catholics etc. Moreover, within daily Egyptian popular representations, Copts are stereotypically seen as elitist and bourgeois because of their economic leverage through entrepreneurial successes of Coptic businessmen such as Naguib Sawires – the founder of Orascom, the biggest telecommunications network in the Middle East and Africa.
The fundamentalist voices of some Copts living in the West, especially the US and Canada, pressuring Western governments to interfere in Egyptian domestic politics, leads to a scenario where Copts in Egypt are seen as Western colluders and in turn bear the brunt of disgruntled local elements as well as blatant institutional discrimination. Nonetheless, these depictions do not fully explain why these violent incidents persist.
As renowned anthropologist Arjun Appadurai succinctly explains in his book The Fear of Small Numbers : "the existence of even the smallest minority within national boundaries is seen as an intolerable deficit in the purity of the national whole . . . Minorities being a reminder of this small but frustrating deficit, thus unleash the urge to purify."
The predominantly rural south of Egypt has historically languished through mismanaged policies of economic advancement of various governments and has been depicted as racially and technologically backward in Egyptian and Western popular imaginations.
The demographic make-up of towns such as Nag Hammadi have large minorities pitted against each other where Christians and Muslims roughly represent the same number of inhabitants but political power resides with corrupt local authorities intent on subverting any notion of justice. The climate of economic disenfranchisement in these towns plus the venomous diatribes of some extremist religiously untrained Muslim clerics presents a fertile ground for young Muslims – especially men – to express their rage in violent ways.
The Egyptian Government is complicit in trying to present a picture of religious harmony to allay Western fears of human right violations but the ugliness and fissures of these local disputes dispel the cosmetic attempts of a cowardly government dealing with its domestic politics and its international image especially in relation to Gaza.
In an interview broadcast on Egyptian national TV a few hours before this fateful incident, the head of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, urged a return to the ideals of the 1919 Revolution against British colonial occupation. He implored Egyptians to a secularist ethics of citizenship based on mutual respect for difference beyond the dead-end of religious labelling. It is these wise words that must be heeded now more than ever for Nag Hammadi not to continue being a site where ghosts continue to dwell.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney. His research deals with the politics of exile, race and religion.
Source: theage.com.au
Men who stare at votes: Democratisation in Iraq
Men who stare at votes: Democratisation in Iraq
FARID FARID
March 10, 2010
Comments 4
An Iraqi woman flashes her ink-stained finger after voting in the general election. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE
The other day I saw the satirically astute and politically punchy comedy The Men who Stare at Goats. The stellar cast of George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Kevin Spacey and recent Oscar winner Jeff Bridges ensured an entertaining experience through some devastatingly funny acting.
The movie, based on the book by Jon Ronson, details the US army's flirtations with new age philosophy in an attempt to soften its image as an imperialistic power, by deploying a new breed of earth-friendly soldiers.
The movie's prescient political themes played well with the honest and tragi-comic mishaps portrayed by these seasoned actors. However, it was a strange experience to sit and laugh at Clooney's charming goofiness, knowing that the brutal geography that the film depicted in Iraq was littered with wounded bodies and decrepit corpses.
In a few days it will be seven years since the start of the American-led occupation of Iraq, which plunged the country in a postcolonial quagmire of warring factions and social and political upheavals that blur sectarian lines.
With roughly two deadly explosions every day last year (706, causing 2972 deaths), Iraq is the world's capital of non-state terrorism, suffering more deaths from such attacks than any other country.
Furthermore, the conflict has led to the region's largest silent refugee catastrophe since 1948 (following the creation of the state of Israel and displacement of 750,000 Palestinian refugees).
UNHCR estimates that more than 4.2 million Iraqis have left their homes since the beginning of the conflict in 2003. Most of them are internally displaced persons caught in a limbo of not being able to leave Iraq for neighbouring countries, such as Syria and Jordan, but unable to return to their homes for fears of persecution and the increasingly frequent chance of being annihilated.
Some Western countries, including Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden, have also acquiesced to domestic political pressure from neo-conservative racist elements and have started sending back the miniscule number of Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers who have been living in their countries.
The headlines telling of the lauded successes of the coalition forces in Iraq neglect to outline the humanity behind the men in orange jumpsuits and the women who are unable to leave their houses. Meanwhile, compassion fatigue begins to set in for viewers.
In The Men Who Stare at Goats, Bridges and Clooney "free" Iraqi prisoners and goats that are tortured on a nameless US base. They put LSD in the water and wait for the hallucinatory effects to kick in and for the soldiers to temporarily forget their duties as occupiers.
This deliverance of freedom as an act of neo-colonial benevolence ultimately strips Iraqis of their humanity juxtaposing, as it does, the images of goats and Iraqi prisoners and confirming their equivalent statuses as mere animals.
The trivialisation of the travails of Iraqis worldwide extends to mainstream media, which glosses over the fact that democratisation in the Middle East cannot be configured through ballots and paper.
Last week, Iraqis worldwide had the chance to cast their votes in the state's second elections since the overthrow and brutal execution of Saddam Hussein.
As with any elections, there has been the standard political bickering, backroom strategising and propaganda from various parties and rival blocs. Anecdotally, I heard of several Iraqis in Sydney who were barred from voting due to what they called ethnic and religious discrimination.
Local community media outlets were banned from covering the poll, leading to a lack of transparency.
The political process has been one of disenchantment, with no real representation for competing constituencies. This is because of American involvement in manufacturing consent through an imposed democracy framework that is not indigenous to Iraqi ideas of democracy.
Although there has been a high voter turnout and women were represented in this election, corruption remains rife in Prime Minister Al Maliki's government. Multinational oil contracts are sold to the highest bidder, while water and electricity remain scarce commodities for the populace.
Al Maliki's State of Law Coalition Shi'a-dominated splinter party is ironically named, because the security situation has deteriorated considerably rather than alleviated in the past year.
Violence increased leading up to the elections, with 36 people dying on polling day itself.
What is needed now are not cosmetic attempts to remedy a situation that started seven years ago in Washington's neo-con circles, but a genuine ceding of sovereignty to Iraqis. What this entails is not a hasty withdrawal, as projected for 2011, without understanding the humanitarian ramifications.
Rather, political transparency must start with recognising the plight of internally displaced people and the brain drain that besieges Iraq. Organisations such as the Iraqi Australian Forum must be called upon to play a key role in a more hopeful future through pooling resources that are indigenous to modes of governance and social life in Iraq.
Until the agency of Iraqis is a political priority, the current melee of destruction will continue. The poetic words of one of my interviewees in verse sums up the situation; "home is a language that is only spoken during the time of war." Unfortunately, it will continue to be spoken long after this election.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles.
Source: theage.com.au
FARID FARID
March 10, 2010
Comments 4
An Iraqi woman flashes her ink-stained finger after voting in the general election. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE
The other day I saw the satirically astute and politically punchy comedy The Men who Stare at Goats. The stellar cast of George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Kevin Spacey and recent Oscar winner Jeff Bridges ensured an entertaining experience through some devastatingly funny acting.
The movie, based on the book by Jon Ronson, details the US army's flirtations with new age philosophy in an attempt to soften its image as an imperialistic power, by deploying a new breed of earth-friendly soldiers.
The movie's prescient political themes played well with the honest and tragi-comic mishaps portrayed by these seasoned actors. However, it was a strange experience to sit and laugh at Clooney's charming goofiness, knowing that the brutal geography that the film depicted in Iraq was littered with wounded bodies and decrepit corpses.
In a few days it will be seven years since the start of the American-led occupation of Iraq, which plunged the country in a postcolonial quagmire of warring factions and social and political upheavals that blur sectarian lines.
With roughly two deadly explosions every day last year (706, causing 2972 deaths), Iraq is the world's capital of non-state terrorism, suffering more deaths from such attacks than any other country.
Furthermore, the conflict has led to the region's largest silent refugee catastrophe since 1948 (following the creation of the state of Israel and displacement of 750,000 Palestinian refugees).
UNHCR estimates that more than 4.2 million Iraqis have left their homes since the beginning of the conflict in 2003. Most of them are internally displaced persons caught in a limbo of not being able to leave Iraq for neighbouring countries, such as Syria and Jordan, but unable to return to their homes for fears of persecution and the increasingly frequent chance of being annihilated.
Some Western countries, including Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden, have also acquiesced to domestic political pressure from neo-conservative racist elements and have started sending back the miniscule number of Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers who have been living in their countries.
The headlines telling of the lauded successes of the coalition forces in Iraq neglect to outline the humanity behind the men in orange jumpsuits and the women who are unable to leave their houses. Meanwhile, compassion fatigue begins to set in for viewers.
In The Men Who Stare at Goats, Bridges and Clooney "free" Iraqi prisoners and goats that are tortured on a nameless US base. They put LSD in the water and wait for the hallucinatory effects to kick in and for the soldiers to temporarily forget their duties as occupiers.
This deliverance of freedom as an act of neo-colonial benevolence ultimately strips Iraqis of their humanity juxtaposing, as it does, the images of goats and Iraqi prisoners and confirming their equivalent statuses as mere animals.
The trivialisation of the travails of Iraqis worldwide extends to mainstream media, which glosses over the fact that democratisation in the Middle East cannot be configured through ballots and paper.
Last week, Iraqis worldwide had the chance to cast their votes in the state's second elections since the overthrow and brutal execution of Saddam Hussein.
As with any elections, there has been the standard political bickering, backroom strategising and propaganda from various parties and rival blocs. Anecdotally, I heard of several Iraqis in Sydney who were barred from voting due to what they called ethnic and religious discrimination.
Local community media outlets were banned from covering the poll, leading to a lack of transparency.
The political process has been one of disenchantment, with no real representation for competing constituencies. This is because of American involvement in manufacturing consent through an imposed democracy framework that is not indigenous to Iraqi ideas of democracy.
Although there has been a high voter turnout and women were represented in this election, corruption remains rife in Prime Minister Al Maliki's government. Multinational oil contracts are sold to the highest bidder, while water and electricity remain scarce commodities for the populace.
Al Maliki's State of Law Coalition Shi'a-dominated splinter party is ironically named, because the security situation has deteriorated considerably rather than alleviated in the past year.
Violence increased leading up to the elections, with 36 people dying on polling day itself.
What is needed now are not cosmetic attempts to remedy a situation that started seven years ago in Washington's neo-con circles, but a genuine ceding of sovereignty to Iraqis. What this entails is not a hasty withdrawal, as projected for 2011, without understanding the humanitarian ramifications.
Rather, political transparency must start with recognising the plight of internally displaced people and the brain drain that besieges Iraq. Organisations such as the Iraqi Australian Forum must be called upon to play a key role in a more hopeful future through pooling resources that are indigenous to modes of governance and social life in Iraq.
Until the agency of Iraqis is a political priority, the current melee of destruction will continue. The poetic words of one of my interviewees in verse sums up the situation; "home is a language that is only spoken during the time of war." Unfortunately, it will continue to be spoken long after this election.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles.
Source: theage.com.au
Welcoming Death: Asylum seeking and Australia
Welcoming death: asylum seeking and Australia
FARID FARID
April 21, 2010
Comments 87
Illustration: Harry Afentoglou
There's something about Mary. A middle-aged Iraqi Assyrian lady, she died a few days before Easter solemnly in the sanitised environment of a Brisbane hospital after a short but vigorous resistance to breast cancer. Her small group of friends who became her family had to rummage through her phone contacts to notify what's left of her family back in Iraq. A close friend of my mother, I only saw her once at the Arab Film Festival last year after watching a postmodern Egyptian film called Eye of the Sun. The film's narrative is wrenching and weaves docu-footage from Iraq by the director Ibrahim Batout into the story of a highly educated Egyptian doctor, Mariam, who goes to Baghdad to research the carcinogenic effects of the depleted uranium left by US troops in the first Gulf War. For Mary, the poignancy of this story was not lost as the familiar landscapes reminded her of more than just her debilitating illness but also the travails of leaving family and friends behind to seek a better life.
Mary's story is not just about a hapless refugee who warrants the sympathy of the Australian public because of her angst and trauma-ridden life where she lost her brothers, cousins and parents in the successive wars and invasions that took place within the borders of Iraq. Her story matters because of its unique and innate humanity that parallels the millions of other stories that are untold and unheard in the hysterical dog whistle politics surrounding refugees and asylum seekers. In the hoopla of concocted facts and figures being brandished about by Liberal, Labour and Green politicians alike as some sort of empirical proof that the "Australian way of life" has become threatened, asylum seekers on rusty boats effectively morph into faceless missing persons without biographies clamouring for ethical recognition by the state and its citizens.
The hyperbolic attention given to boats and the people on them at this time detracts from the ineffectual implementation of policies of a government trying to establish its political identity. Rudd's governmental demeanor is agonisingly hesitant in convincing itself and the Australian public of the Third Way ideology it adopted in following the British Labour model, which gingerly straddles the lofty ideals of multiculturalism and socialism and the rancorous market values of capitalism. This was sublimely illustrated with the halting of processing asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan specifically announced last week and in effect sending a message to these asylum seekers that Australia's internationally vaunted multicultural tolerance extends to some but not others. More importantly the recent visual and rhetorical bombardment about population control (highlighted with the appointment of a Population Minister) raises more than just policy questions but also existential fears about who we are as Australians? In the process what gets left behind as always is the individual's life story of traversing political hotspots and emotional landmines whether by boat or plane or on foot or even swimming!
Just like the character, Bilal, in Philippe Lioret's film Welcome whose sole destiny is to arduously swim across the troubled waters of the English channel from the French town of Calais to be repatriated with his estranged girlfriend in England. The film demystifies the land of milk and honey imagery that accompanies the safe havens of liberal democratic Western polities such as France and Australia by exposing the murky underside of the law put by the French state to penalise citizens who help asylum seekers under Article L622-1.
Similarly in Australia, the categories of legal and illegal have become blurred with the privatisation of border security in two ways. First, those seeking asylum must fill out Form 866, which the Department of Immigration and Citizenship stipulates that when lodging the application it ''may'' ask for biometric technologies to be used for better identification purposes. Recently, the Australian Government announced that it would invest $69 million in the next four years to introduce biometric checks for visa applications. Biometric information uses measurable biological characteristics to establish a unique identity for a person through the creation of a template. The program is being undertaken in collaboration with the UK Government, which has a similar scheme already in operation. As cultural theorist Joseph Pugliese has painstakingly argued in his extensive research on biometric technologies they ''are not the neutral, objective systems that their proponents argue they are. On the contrary, their seemingly pure geometry, their transcendental algorithms, and apparently unmotivated digital formulas are all inflected with the dense sociocultural and historical significations of their designers.''
Second, detention centres operate on a mercantile system where the states contracts mostly British private security companies such as Serco to deal with the excess political baggage of refugees and asylum seekers. These places of transit are ironically the state's form of welcome that Loiret's film is referring to. These barbed wire buildings become more disturbing in light of the Australian values statement that asylum seekers have to sign with their 866 form to proclaim their loyalty to Australia. DIC maintains that these values ''have broad community agreement and underpin Australian society and culture''; but these defence edifices stand in breach of the first value listed — ''respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual''.
Mary's ordeal was softened, as she would describe it, by the Australian state's provision of free medical care. It was the form of welcome that kept her dignity intact as she battled her illness.
Asylum parallels death in many ways precisely because there is no choice in either. The body and the soul are suspended ceaselessly in a temporal vacuum that eats away at them. In the end, you seek some form of welcome but definitely not the one that the Australian state has been giving of late.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles. He also teaches a course on multiculturalism at the University of NSW.
Source: theage.com.au
FARID FARID
April 21, 2010
Comments 87
Illustration: Harry Afentoglou
There's something about Mary. A middle-aged Iraqi Assyrian lady, she died a few days before Easter solemnly in the sanitised environment of a Brisbane hospital after a short but vigorous resistance to breast cancer. Her small group of friends who became her family had to rummage through her phone contacts to notify what's left of her family back in Iraq. A close friend of my mother, I only saw her once at the Arab Film Festival last year after watching a postmodern Egyptian film called Eye of the Sun. The film's narrative is wrenching and weaves docu-footage from Iraq by the director Ibrahim Batout into the story of a highly educated Egyptian doctor, Mariam, who goes to Baghdad to research the carcinogenic effects of the depleted uranium left by US troops in the first Gulf War. For Mary, the poignancy of this story was not lost as the familiar landscapes reminded her of more than just her debilitating illness but also the travails of leaving family and friends behind to seek a better life.
Mary's story is not just about a hapless refugee who warrants the sympathy of the Australian public because of her angst and trauma-ridden life where she lost her brothers, cousins and parents in the successive wars and invasions that took place within the borders of Iraq. Her story matters because of its unique and innate humanity that parallels the millions of other stories that are untold and unheard in the hysterical dog whistle politics surrounding refugees and asylum seekers. In the hoopla of concocted facts and figures being brandished about by Liberal, Labour and Green politicians alike as some sort of empirical proof that the "Australian way of life" has become threatened, asylum seekers on rusty boats effectively morph into faceless missing persons without biographies clamouring for ethical recognition by the state and its citizens.
The hyperbolic attention given to boats and the people on them at this time detracts from the ineffectual implementation of policies of a government trying to establish its political identity. Rudd's governmental demeanor is agonisingly hesitant in convincing itself and the Australian public of the Third Way ideology it adopted in following the British Labour model, which gingerly straddles the lofty ideals of multiculturalism and socialism and the rancorous market values of capitalism. This was sublimely illustrated with the halting of processing asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan specifically announced last week and in effect sending a message to these asylum seekers that Australia's internationally vaunted multicultural tolerance extends to some but not others. More importantly the recent visual and rhetorical bombardment about population control (highlighted with the appointment of a Population Minister) raises more than just policy questions but also existential fears about who we are as Australians? In the process what gets left behind as always is the individual's life story of traversing political hotspots and emotional landmines whether by boat or plane or on foot or even swimming!
Just like the character, Bilal, in Philippe Lioret's film Welcome whose sole destiny is to arduously swim across the troubled waters of the English channel from the French town of Calais to be repatriated with his estranged girlfriend in England. The film demystifies the land of milk and honey imagery that accompanies the safe havens of liberal democratic Western polities such as France and Australia by exposing the murky underside of the law put by the French state to penalise citizens who help asylum seekers under Article L622-1.
Similarly in Australia, the categories of legal and illegal have become blurred with the privatisation of border security in two ways. First, those seeking asylum must fill out Form 866, which the Department of Immigration and Citizenship stipulates that when lodging the application it ''may'' ask for biometric technologies to be used for better identification purposes. Recently, the Australian Government announced that it would invest $69 million in the next four years to introduce biometric checks for visa applications. Biometric information uses measurable biological characteristics to establish a unique identity for a person through the creation of a template. The program is being undertaken in collaboration with the UK Government, which has a similar scheme already in operation. As cultural theorist Joseph Pugliese has painstakingly argued in his extensive research on biometric technologies they ''are not the neutral, objective systems that their proponents argue they are. On the contrary, their seemingly pure geometry, their transcendental algorithms, and apparently unmotivated digital formulas are all inflected with the dense sociocultural and historical significations of their designers.''
Second, detention centres operate on a mercantile system where the states contracts mostly British private security companies such as Serco to deal with the excess political baggage of refugees and asylum seekers. These places of transit are ironically the state's form of welcome that Loiret's film is referring to. These barbed wire buildings become more disturbing in light of the Australian values statement that asylum seekers have to sign with their 866 form to proclaim their loyalty to Australia. DIC maintains that these values ''have broad community agreement and underpin Australian society and culture''; but these defence edifices stand in breach of the first value listed — ''respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual''.
Mary's ordeal was softened, as she would describe it, by the Australian state's provision of free medical care. It was the form of welcome that kept her dignity intact as she battled her illness.
Asylum parallels death in many ways precisely because there is no choice in either. The body and the soul are suspended ceaselessly in a temporal vacuum that eats away at them. In the end, you seek some form of welcome but definitely not the one that the Australian state has been giving of late.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles. He also teaches a course on multiculturalism at the University of NSW.
Source: theage.com.au
A people who refuse to be vanished
A people who refuse to be vanished
FARID FARID
May 13, 2010
Comments 19
A section of the controversial Israeli barrier is seen between the Shuafat refugee camp (right), in the West Bank near Jerusalem, and Pisgat Zeev (backr), in an area Israel annexed to Jerusalem after capturing it in 1967. Photo: Reuters
"The land is like an open book on which nature and humans continuously write," says Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh describing the ecological formation of the majestic geological textures of Ramallah.
However, he cautions that this geographical narrative has been withered away through "Israeli settlers [who] have been sedulously writing their own script, causing tremendous destruction to the natural beauty of these hills".
Tomorrow, Palestinians will commemorate the 62nd anniversary of their dispossession. The day is known as al-Nakba or the catastrophe. The situation cannot be spoken of as the "Israel-Palestine" conflict because the latter's geographic and political borders have shrunk to a nullifying minimum. It is aptly described in Shehadeh's subtitle – vanishing landscape — for his Orwell Prize winning book Palestinian Walks. It is perhaps ironic that in the coming days failed peace talks will resume after an 18-month stall that has paralleled the nascent administration of US President Barack Obama.
The state of affairs is dire, with US Envoy George Mitchell acting as a gagged intermediary negotiating the exorbitant demands of a right-wing conservative Israeli government seeking to expand its reach into the already occupied territories of east Jerusalem. Speaking a few weeks ago on the Israeli Channel 2TV, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu asserted: "I am saying one thing: there will be no freeze in Jerusalem."
The mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, yesterday affirmed this nationalist stance as part of the Jerusalem Day celebrations saying: "We will continue to build in all parts of Jerusalem. The promise of a future Jerusalem with a Jewish majority is a strategic mission for all of us." This political moment attests to the zero sum game Palestinians have been forced to endure in the past few years. The Gaza Strip is the most densely populated strip of land in the world, with about 1.5 million people inhabiting a stretch of land just 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for years, but it has been virtually isolated since 2007, with the intensification of territorial subjugation extending to sea, land and airspace. These spaces were effectively sealed to humanitarian organisations during the internationally condemned campaign launched by Israel in December last year where nearly 1400 Palestinians were killed including 350 children. The concrete, fortified wall that enmeshes the West Bank stands at eight metres high, which is higher than the Berlin Wall, and stretches across 700 kilometres of land. The litany of abuses and deaths continues on both sides but the structural inequalities widen on the ground. By this I mean arguments that the security of Israel must be safeguarded from the suicide bombings and katyusha rockets from Hamas have become fallacious in the face of the increasing spatial geometry of oppression that encases a whole population by another population. The covert operations that Israel has engaged in for years, and that was revealed a few months ago with Mahmoud al-Mabhouh case, garnered international attention and condemnation. However, these operations have been complimented by a blatant matrix of Israeli-only roads, tunnels, bridges and electricity that connect settlements to each other with a muted international outcry.
The current impasse can be traced to processes of historical erasure, political messianism, moral corruption and most of all geographical segregation based on the narcissism of minor differences. The critical site of the land determines the conditions of life for both Palestinians and Israelis.
For the Palestinians it has become unbearably difficult to conduct daily human transactions and maintain relationships that have to manoeuvre the bureaucratic machinery of the Israeli state. And that is not mentioning 1.2 million Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel, who are subject to different laws as non-Jews. A return to the land must be imperative. By this I mean a secular and truly democratic polity that respects all inhabitants of this fractured territory.
Shehadeh's book is divided into six walks or what he calls sarhas when he takes on the uneven natural concatenations of the land. Sarha, in Arabic, means an uninhibited wandering or an entranced state of roaming and exploration. Even though it does seem like a foolish and wondrous thought for people to just roam about, there is a political freedom attached for a person to just walk without security walls, white phosphorous bombs, peace negotiations and summits in Sharm El Sheikh or Washington to disturb their unplanned journeys. Surely this is the book of the land that needs to be written more than ever.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles. He also teaches a course on multiculturalism at the University of NSW.
Source: theage.com.au
FARID FARID
May 13, 2010
Comments 19
A section of the controversial Israeli barrier is seen between the Shuafat refugee camp (right), in the West Bank near Jerusalem, and Pisgat Zeev (backr), in an area Israel annexed to Jerusalem after capturing it in 1967. Photo: Reuters
"The land is like an open book on which nature and humans continuously write," says Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh describing the ecological formation of the majestic geological textures of Ramallah.
However, he cautions that this geographical narrative has been withered away through "Israeli settlers [who] have been sedulously writing their own script, causing tremendous destruction to the natural beauty of these hills".
Tomorrow, Palestinians will commemorate the 62nd anniversary of their dispossession. The day is known as al-Nakba or the catastrophe. The situation cannot be spoken of as the "Israel-Palestine" conflict because the latter's geographic and political borders have shrunk to a nullifying minimum. It is aptly described in Shehadeh's subtitle – vanishing landscape — for his Orwell Prize winning book Palestinian Walks. It is perhaps ironic that in the coming days failed peace talks will resume after an 18-month stall that has paralleled the nascent administration of US President Barack Obama.
The state of affairs is dire, with US Envoy George Mitchell acting as a gagged intermediary negotiating the exorbitant demands of a right-wing conservative Israeli government seeking to expand its reach into the already occupied territories of east Jerusalem. Speaking a few weeks ago on the Israeli Channel 2TV, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu asserted: "I am saying one thing: there will be no freeze in Jerusalem."
The mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, yesterday affirmed this nationalist stance as part of the Jerusalem Day celebrations saying: "We will continue to build in all parts of Jerusalem. The promise of a future Jerusalem with a Jewish majority is a strategic mission for all of us." This political moment attests to the zero sum game Palestinians have been forced to endure in the past few years. The Gaza Strip is the most densely populated strip of land in the world, with about 1.5 million people inhabiting a stretch of land just 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for years, but it has been virtually isolated since 2007, with the intensification of territorial subjugation extending to sea, land and airspace. These spaces were effectively sealed to humanitarian organisations during the internationally condemned campaign launched by Israel in December last year where nearly 1400 Palestinians were killed including 350 children. The concrete, fortified wall that enmeshes the West Bank stands at eight metres high, which is higher than the Berlin Wall, and stretches across 700 kilometres of land. The litany of abuses and deaths continues on both sides but the structural inequalities widen on the ground. By this I mean arguments that the security of Israel must be safeguarded from the suicide bombings and katyusha rockets from Hamas have become fallacious in the face of the increasing spatial geometry of oppression that encases a whole population by another population. The covert operations that Israel has engaged in for years, and that was revealed a few months ago with Mahmoud al-Mabhouh case, garnered international attention and condemnation. However, these operations have been complimented by a blatant matrix of Israeli-only roads, tunnels, bridges and electricity that connect settlements to each other with a muted international outcry.
The current impasse can be traced to processes of historical erasure, political messianism, moral corruption and most of all geographical segregation based on the narcissism of minor differences. The critical site of the land determines the conditions of life for both Palestinians and Israelis.
For the Palestinians it has become unbearably difficult to conduct daily human transactions and maintain relationships that have to manoeuvre the bureaucratic machinery of the Israeli state. And that is not mentioning 1.2 million Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel, who are subject to different laws as non-Jews. A return to the land must be imperative. By this I mean a secular and truly democratic polity that respects all inhabitants of this fractured territory.
Shehadeh's book is divided into six walks or what he calls sarhas when he takes on the uneven natural concatenations of the land. Sarha, in Arabic, means an uninhibited wandering or an entranced state of roaming and exploration. Even though it does seem like a foolish and wondrous thought for people to just roam about, there is a political freedom attached for a person to just walk without security walls, white phosphorous bombs, peace negotiations and summits in Sharm El Sheikh or Washington to disturb their unplanned journeys. Surely this is the book of the land that needs to be written more than ever.
Farid Farid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney researching the politics of trauma and loss among Iraqi exiles. He also teaches a course on multiculturalism at the University of NSW.
Source: theage.com.au
Arabs & The City
Arabs and the city: challenging stereotypes
FARID FARID
July 8, 2010
The Age - http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/contributors/arabs-and-the-city-challenging-stereotypes-20100707-100fh.html
A scene from the film City of Life, part of the 2010 Arab Film Festival.
Ghassan Hage opens his book Against Paranoid Nationalism with an astutely funny but true observation that "in 2001 a considerable number of indigenous people and Arab and Muslim Australians felt demeaned, inferiorised and excluded from the rest of society — Asians were breathing with a sigh of relief, at least they'd have time to replenish for the next round".
He follows this statement with a provocative question: Does being demeaned inferiorised, treated insensitively and excluded mean you are being subjected to racism?"
It is especially timely after new Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared her lifting of the cultural ban on political correctness. Hage's answer, "It's no longer easy to answer this question" is telling of the current malaise of race politics.
The existential crisis that haunts Arabs and other racialised minorities in Western societies, is, of course, nothing new but it has clearly intensified in the nearly nine years after the September 11th attacks. It emanates from the constant barrage of dehumanising parlance and imagery that characterises Australian vernacular — be it liberally cloaked or purely xenophobic — when it comes to Arabs. Arabs are either seen as exciting exotic commodities readily available for public consumption — think of the useless Sex and The City 2 — or as morally depraved beings with patriarchal proclivities and misogynistic mores animating their seemingly libidinal lives (Sex and The City 2 again). It has been 10 years since the infamous gang rapes in western Sydney by a group of youths of Lebanese backgrounds as well as other nationalities. There is still rhetorical currency for the lazy but automatic linking of ethnicity with criminality as Cindy Wockner, author of Evil in the Suburbs, casually made repeatedly during a recent interview on National Nine News. The pejorative title belies what Wockner and her co-author Michael Porta aim to present. They recycle centuries-old skewed representations of the Arab world about Arab men being lascvisious and inherently violent and market them as cultural truths. As Dr Paula Abood notes in her blog, Race & The City "in tracking the emergence of this racialised character over the past decade in newspaper stories and on tabloid television, it seems this cinematic construction is precisely what the market wants".
Not to be outdone, in his satirical blog for The National Times author and self-declared book pimp John Birmingham, attempts to inject caustic humour and social wit when he quips about mundane events in everyday life. He describes how recently he was contacted via Facebook by a money laundering scammer from the United Arab Emirates. Troubled by the trivial request he muses: "The thing is, though, I've never met this Ahmed Khizer Khan, citizen of the United Arab Emirates, and I'm not entirely sure as to how I might proceed with someone who is very obviously a foreign Johnny." He ends his blog post with the enticing offer of free copies of his new book "to be sent out to the commenters who provide me with the most amusing suggestions as to how I might respond to Mr Ahmed Khizer Khan, citizen of the United Arab Emirates. Bonus copies for anyone who can actually a get a quid out of him. Or a Youtube vid of him dancing naked with a goat. That works for me too."
I may not be able to fulfill Birmingham's ambiguous fantasy of seeing an Emirati dance with a goat, but, to make sure I'm in for the running for this life-changing prize, I suggest going along to watch the Arab Film Festival of Australia, which is currently touring all major centres. One of the films screening, City of Life, by up and coming young British Emirati director Ali Mostafa, details the cosmopolitan complexities and intricate social layerings of Dubai.
Constructed as a series of intersecting plot lines in the tradition of recent Hollywood movies such as Crash and Babel, the film follows the messy and real lives of a vivacious Romanian air hostess, an Indian cab driver aspiring for Bollywood fame, a narcisstic British advertising agent, and an Emirati youngster who does not have access to the riches of this booming metropolis and instead lives on the marginalised outskirts of the city with his grandmother and sister.
Other films such 12 Angry Lebanese and The Time that Remains, provide viewers with a diverse panoply of images and feelings that Birmingham and other viewers might not have access to in the over-saturated media language of always picturing Arabs as problematic.
The diverse Arab filmmakers capture the affective and creative dynamics of the Arab world on screen through delicate montages and thought provoking dialogues. These visual narratives are moved by an intimate melange of beautiful and ugly self-representations, but that are ultimately real in their artistic expressions. I understand Birmingham's blog is supposed to generate some form of social commentary with his enlightened and critical jesting but what I am suggesting for him and for viewers around the country to be exposed to another language. And by the way, the festival organisers also send out messages via Facebook!
The Arab Film Festival opens in Melbourne today. For further details please visit www.arabfilmfestival.com.au. Farid Farid is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney.
FARID FARID
July 8, 2010
The Age - http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/contributors/arabs-and-the-city-challenging-stereotypes-20100707-100fh.html
A scene from the film City of Life, part of the 2010 Arab Film Festival.
Ghassan Hage opens his book Against Paranoid Nationalism with an astutely funny but true observation that "in 2001 a considerable number of indigenous people and Arab and Muslim Australians felt demeaned, inferiorised and excluded from the rest of society — Asians were breathing with a sigh of relief, at least they'd have time to replenish for the next round".
He follows this statement with a provocative question: Does being demeaned inferiorised, treated insensitively and excluded mean you are being subjected to racism?"
It is especially timely after new Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared her lifting of the cultural ban on political correctness. Hage's answer, "It's no longer easy to answer this question" is telling of the current malaise of race politics.
The existential crisis that haunts Arabs and other racialised minorities in Western societies, is, of course, nothing new but it has clearly intensified in the nearly nine years after the September 11th attacks. It emanates from the constant barrage of dehumanising parlance and imagery that characterises Australian vernacular — be it liberally cloaked or purely xenophobic — when it comes to Arabs. Arabs are either seen as exciting exotic commodities readily available for public consumption — think of the useless Sex and The City 2 — or as morally depraved beings with patriarchal proclivities and misogynistic mores animating their seemingly libidinal lives (Sex and The City 2 again). It has been 10 years since the infamous gang rapes in western Sydney by a group of youths of Lebanese backgrounds as well as other nationalities. There is still rhetorical currency for the lazy but automatic linking of ethnicity with criminality as Cindy Wockner, author of Evil in the Suburbs, casually made repeatedly during a recent interview on National Nine News. The pejorative title belies what Wockner and her co-author Michael Porta aim to present. They recycle centuries-old skewed representations of the Arab world about Arab men being lascvisious and inherently violent and market them as cultural truths. As Dr Paula Abood notes in her blog, Race & The City "in tracking the emergence of this racialised character over the past decade in newspaper stories and on tabloid television, it seems this cinematic construction is precisely what the market wants".
Not to be outdone, in his satirical blog for The National Times author and self-declared book pimp John Birmingham, attempts to inject caustic humour and social wit when he quips about mundane events in everyday life. He describes how recently he was contacted via Facebook by a money laundering scammer from the United Arab Emirates. Troubled by the trivial request he muses: "The thing is, though, I've never met this Ahmed Khizer Khan, citizen of the United Arab Emirates, and I'm not entirely sure as to how I might proceed with someone who is very obviously a foreign Johnny." He ends his blog post with the enticing offer of free copies of his new book "to be sent out to the commenters who provide me with the most amusing suggestions as to how I might respond to Mr Ahmed Khizer Khan, citizen of the United Arab Emirates. Bonus copies for anyone who can actually a get a quid out of him. Or a Youtube vid of him dancing naked with a goat. That works for me too."
I may not be able to fulfill Birmingham's ambiguous fantasy of seeing an Emirati dance with a goat, but, to make sure I'm in for the running for this life-changing prize, I suggest going along to watch the Arab Film Festival of Australia, which is currently touring all major centres. One of the films screening, City of Life, by up and coming young British Emirati director Ali Mostafa, details the cosmopolitan complexities and intricate social layerings of Dubai.
Constructed as a series of intersecting plot lines in the tradition of recent Hollywood movies such as Crash and Babel, the film follows the messy and real lives of a vivacious Romanian air hostess, an Indian cab driver aspiring for Bollywood fame, a narcisstic British advertising agent, and an Emirati youngster who does not have access to the riches of this booming metropolis and instead lives on the marginalised outskirts of the city with his grandmother and sister.
Other films such 12 Angry Lebanese and The Time that Remains, provide viewers with a diverse panoply of images and feelings that Birmingham and other viewers might not have access to in the over-saturated media language of always picturing Arabs as problematic.
The diverse Arab filmmakers capture the affective and creative dynamics of the Arab world on screen through delicate montages and thought provoking dialogues. These visual narratives are moved by an intimate melange of beautiful and ugly self-representations, but that are ultimately real in their artistic expressions. I understand Birmingham's blog is supposed to generate some form of social commentary with his enlightened and critical jesting but what I am suggesting for him and for viewers around the country to be exposed to another language. And by the way, the festival organisers also send out messages via Facebook!
The Arab Film Festival opens in Melbourne today. For further details please visit www.arabfilmfestival.com.au. Farid Farid is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney.
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