Posts filed under 'settler colonialism'

Every Dirge Sung: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on Liberian Poetry as Literature of Witness

March 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I wanted Liberia placed on the literary map of the world. And my life’s goal was to be that writer. . .

Named by The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017) as “the first major poet to emerge from Liberia in decades,” Dr Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in her mother’s hometown of Dolokeh, Maryland County, southeastern Liberia, and raised in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. She then emigrated from there to the United States with her family during the First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). With six critically-acclaimed poetry collections under her belt, Nigerian historian Ayodeji Olukoju has called her “a rising Liberian female literary star who has made a mark as a poet of note”, and she has been named Chee Dawanyeno by her people, the Grebo. Dr Patricia believes in the poetic moral imperative to bear witness on the brutalities—such as war, settler-colonialism, carnage, and genocide—perpetrated by those with structural power against the common people. In the words of Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Jaji, from her panegyric “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley”: “But you look death in the eye and it looks down.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Patricia, recently proclaimed the Republic of Liberia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, on Liberian poetry as literature of witness and its poetic topography de nos jours; the presence of African orality and indigenous storytelling in Anglophone African writings; and the anthology she edited from the University of Nebraska Press, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a survivor to the First Liberian Civil War, your activism involves documentation of and fact-finding on Liberian women’s stories of trauma as well as speaking your truth as an expert witness (such as during the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minnesota in 2008 as commissioned by The Advocates of Human Rights). You once spoke of enshrining the war through words and of literature as testimony. Is that, for you, the role of the poet in times of lawlessness and monstrosities—a witness?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (PJW): Yes. I believe that the role of an artist and poet is to be the town crier of her people, the voice of the voiceless, the preserver of tradition and history of her people’s sensibility. In our African tradition, the artist belongs to the people, to the community, to the village, and to the clan. As a survivor of the brutal Liberian civil war, I must keep alive our families, friends, and all the people who were silenced in the fourteen-year-long series of civil wars. I have always used my poetry and writing as a tool for activism. One of our mother authors, the late Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana once said, rightly, that, “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

AMMD: In Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), you historicised Liberian poetry, finding its roots as early as the 1800s in the time of statesmen Hilary Teage and Daniel Bashiel Warner—the anthology’s impetus being that “the silence [of Liberian literature at the global level] was deafening.” Can you speak more about this silence and how this anthology is speaking against it?

PJW: The anthology does not speak against the silence, though. It ends the silence. Liberian literature, art, and culture have been suppressed since the country’s founding. The founding fathers who were freed slaves from the South of America built a country fashioned after their former slave masters, where those who had always owned, lived on, and tended to the land were made the subordinates and those from outside were the lone leaders. They relegated the Africans who owned the land at the country’s establishment to a near second-class citizenship, not allowing indigenous Africans in what is now our country to help determine the direction of our country. That lasted for one hundred and thirty-nine years until the first military coup in 1980. The only other time an indigenous African was anywhere near the top of the country’s leadership was when Himie-Too Wesley, or H. Too Wesley, my husband’s great uncle, was made the Vice President in 1924 when the League of Nations charged the Liberian leadership with the enslavement of Krus and Grebo people, H. T. Wesley’s ethnic group. And for historical context, the newcomers, or Americo-Liberians, the freed slaves who founded the nation, were a very tiny minority, ruling the nation for 139 years while indigenous Africans were the huge majority and continue to be today. READ MORE…

A Song of Eternity on the Hill of Slaughter: Najwa Juma on the Palestinian Poetry of Liberation

March 7, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Palestinian poetry has always been the stage on which the Palestinian tragedy was performed.

My encounter with the poetry of Palestinian writer-translator Najwa Juma was made possible by my writer-friend, Asymptote contributor Stefani J Alvarez-Brüggmann—both Najwa and Stefani are alumnae writers-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, an artists’ fellowship at Stuttgart in southwest Germany. For the esteemed and ever-relevant Arab magazine Mizna, Najwa meditates, “There is no salvation but to return / to ask the grandparents chanting / songs of farewell.” Earth, or I daresay a stand-in for the act of coming back to a liberated homeland, malignantly, “is an object of desire and longing in Palestinian poetry,” reflects Sarah Irving in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2021).

 Born three decades after the Nakba in the Gaza Strip, the largest open-air prison in the world according to HumanRightsWatch.org, Najwa is a poet, essayist, fictionist, playwright, translator, and educator whose body of work as an artist-activist chronicle the struggles of the Palestinian woman under settler-colonial occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In the words of Mizna editor George Abraham, Najwa’s poetry arrives “at an impossible music … embody[ing] a resistive spirit of a people who refuse, with the whole of our bodies and voices, to die.”

As of press time, Najwa’s fate is hinged on the disquiet: she is an asylum-seeker in Germany while her family is still in genocide-ravaged Gaza, wishing for a reunification—which you can support via GoFundMe.

In this interview, I spoke with Najwa—confined in a refugee camp in Germany and shivering from the cold of a Covid-19 infection—on the poetry of occupation and exile written from Israeli-occupied Palestine and what it means to write during a time of ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

This interviewer, following Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s call to hijack literary spaces, would like to express unconditional support for Palestinian liberation and call on readers of this interview to “get in the way of the death machine”, wherever and whoever you are. For starters, consider donating an e-sim, fasting for Gaza, sharing and translating the words of Gazan writers, and reading and distributing this chapbook of Palestinian poets.

najwa

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Genocide and ethnic cleansing have been ongoing lived realities in your occupied homeland. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces since October 7th this year—not including the death toll from 2008 to 2020 alone accounting to more than 120,000 Palestinian lives. Leaders of the so-called Free World are either the very perpetrators or are complicitly silent. Much of the world, the equally powerless, can only do the bare minimum: bear witness and never stop speaking against this carnage as it happens right before our eyes. In these times of the unspeakable, what is the role of poetry and what is the task of the poet?

Najwa Juma (NJ): I always loved poetry that expresses emotions, shares ideas, and creates imagery, but at the time I started writing poetry, as a refugee in my own country facing the occupation from childhood, I found myself writing to resist, to make voice for the voiceless, and to feel free under all the restrictions surrounding me. For example my first poem was about a dead Palestinian person who happened to be buried on top of a hill looking at the Gaza sea in an area only Israeli settlers can reach. The poem expressed the fear that this person feel whenever he hears them speaking in Hebrew right next to him.

Whose voices these are I think I know
Strange and fearful sounds though
I miss my mother’s hands and tears
Sitting at my grave vanishing my fears

Throughout my life I have chosen unarticulated feelings and scenes to write about. I think that the deeper you think and see, the deeper you feel and write.  READ MORE…

Sounds Like Fiction: Traversing Minor Detail Again, in the Time of Genocide

February 5, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Amidst the ruins, I want to read Shibli's writing ... as a pedagogy of hope, of waiting, and of revolutionary becoming.

After the shameful decision to cancel Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone in the Global North flocked to read Minor Detail (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), as thousands of writers, intellectuals, editors, and others in the literary ecosystem rightly condemned the cancellation. It was a symptom not only of Europe’s routine silencing of Palestinian voices but, more perniciously, of Germany’s particular brand of virulent anti-antisemitism, its Holocaust memory culture metastasised into a total interdiction on critiques of Israel.

Adania Shibli cites Samira Azzam—a writer whose seemingly unthreatening short stories describing everyday life in Palestine managed to pass the censorship bureau’s checks—as a formative influence. Azzam “contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done”, Shibli writes, for it cultivated in her “a deep yearning for all that had been, including the normal, the banal, and the tragic”. For many of us, grappling with what solidarity and hope can mean in the light of Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence against Gaza, Minor Detail might be such an essential touchstone. How might we (re)read Shibli’s work today, not only as a prescient source of information about Palestine but also as a text that theorises and maps its own aesthetic possibility? With what voice does it continue to address us, reverberating through silence and the distortions of language?

One day, a splotch of black ink bloomed on my well-thumbed copy of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I didn’t know where it came from. The blemish, to my consternation, appeared in the light-grey region of the cover, which depicts an undulating terrain. Misted waves, perhaps, or the volatile sands of a desert. Obsessed with keeping my books as pristine as possible, I took an alcohol swab and wiped the black dot right off.

The smudge was dispatched as swiftly as it had arrived. Days later, I noticed the alcohol had also dissolved the matte surface of the cover where I had rubbed it. A tiny glossy archipelago emerged, its lustre and its jagged edges visible only at an angle, under the light.

Now the sheen reproaches me for thinking I could make something disappear with no trace.

*

Desert / الصحراء

 I want to juxtapose without asserting equivalence; the unnamed Israeli military commander in Minor Detail, too, believes in the seamlessness of disappearance. In the novel’s first half, he helms a Zionist platoon in a mission to conquer the Negev desert. This ruthless assertion of sovereignty takes place in 1949, a year after the traumatic Nakba dispossessed most Palestinians of their homeland. It is also a rearguard response to Egypt’s invasion of an Israeli kibbutz a year prior.

Charged with purging the land of “infiltrators”, the Zionist soldiers massacre a band of Arabs. They capture a Bedouin girl, humiliating, gang-raping, and murdering her. The horror of these bloodthirsty actions is continually evaded: “Then came the sound of heavy gunfire.” The narrative camera, as it were, turns its back on the moment of life’s desecration. Landscape itself seems to consent to these crimes. The desert, an aggressive mouth, collaborates in the erasure of evidence, each occasion with a different attitude: “languidly”, “greedily”, “steadily”, the sand sucks blood, moisture, substance into its depths. READ MORE…

Memory as Political: On Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

January 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Shehadeh treats this memoir as an evocative paean towards a landscape that can never be recovered.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2023

In Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (2012), Norbert Bugeja defines the memoirist as operating “within that representational chasm . . . in which the memoirist’s chosen interpretation of a space or preferred schema of memory come to be reconfigured against the received facts of traditional ideological geographies and vice-versa.” In the harrowing We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh shows he is no exemption to this friction between fact and memory. A Ramallah-based human rights lawyer with several acclaimed memoirs (one received the 2008 Orwell Prize; another was adapted into a stage play) and scholarly essays (covering topics from international law to theatre criticism) to his name, Shehadeh is a cosmopolitan, peripatetic writer and addresses the topic of his personal history and homeland with wide-ranging expertise. According to Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), Shehadeh “is perhaps the most knowledgeable critic of Israel’s labyrinth of legislation in the occupied territories.” In addition to enacting activism through his writing, he also founded al-Haq in the 1970s—a Palestinian organization at the frontlines in peace negotiations and in providing legal aid to Palestinians.

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, his eleventh book of non-fiction, Shehadeh foregrounds the Nakba—the catastrophic aftermath of the 1948 Palestinian war. But a better appreciation of his works necessarily invites a discussion on the milieu of where he is writing from—both ethnopolitically and aesthetically. Ethnopolitically, the memoir centres the land dispossession, drone warfare, and strategic erasure of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military government—as well as the treacheries committed by Palestine’s former coloniser, the Ingleez, Britain, and even neighbouring nations like Jordan and the League of Arab States. Aesthetically, on the other hand, the writing evokes other articles of “resistance literature,” such as those concerning Partition or occupation, as well as the larger body of Arab political essays and political memoirs that permeates Shehadeh’s œuvre: his powerful storytelling emanates from the kind of clearsighted prose afforded by forthright reportage.

Conor McCarthy favourably compared Shehadeh to Edward Said as being “more directly political,” evidently a departure from show don’t tell (a hackneyed chestnut propagated by workshop cultism because there should be, in descriptive writing, room to explain, to tell). Shehadeh takes advantage of the power in exposition even as he plays with form; the narration and the way the chapters are organised as somewhat non-linear and non-chronological, jumping from one particular time and place to another, but remain always guided by both reminiscence and research. READ MORE…