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poeticsofacademia · 10 years

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Sites of Trauma and Traumatic Sights: The Suicide of Khalil Hawi in Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness

When Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6th 1982, Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi decided to take his own life; on the balcony of his apartment in Beirut, he shot himself. Though somewhat overlooked, Hawi’s suicide left a significant impact and imprint on modern Arabic literature. For example, we find references to his poetry and suicide in the literature of Mahmoud Darwish, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī, Buland al-Ḥaydarī, and Ḥasan Naṣr. But today I want to argue that a particular reference to Hawi’s suicide, the one in Dhākirah lil-nisyān: al-zamān: Bayrūt, al-makān: Āb, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated as Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, challenges current approaches to reading dedications and intersections in a literary text. By dedication, I mean an author dedicating a book or poem to an ancestor or contemporary. And by intersections, I mean the presence of multiple voices in a text. Furthermore, I want to argue that trauma theory could help us listen to a certain significance in this reference that would otherwise be impossible. To get there, though, we need a bit of background. So, let’s start with the novel.

Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness is set in August 6th at the height of the Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut. In the title, Darwish deliberately mixes place and time; August is the city, Beirut the month. The collapse of place and time is prevalent throughout the entire narrative. The reader is often transported to the past through the histories of Ibn Athīr and Ibn Kathīr, as well as Usāmah b. Munqidh’s account of the Crusades and Ibn Faḍlān’s epistle on the Vikings. The date also correlates to the anniversary of the United States’ deployment of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. These references establish links across histories, geographies, and practices of testing technologically advanced weapons. I argue that Memory for Forgetfulness is a representation of traumatic experience. Indeed, it is a testimony to the killing of Lebanese nationals and the massacre of Palestinian refugees. It also bears witness to the destruction of the capital and a decisive blow to the spirit of Arab nationalism. Furthermore, it is critical to locate August 6th within a series of tragedies that include the rest of the civil war beginning in 1975, the naksa in 1967, and the nakba in 1948. This way the date is not historically isolated from the chain of traumatic events that precede it, nor is it politically disassociated from the region’s relationship to colonialism, Western imperialism, and Zionism. Beyond historical trauma, it is important to discuss the configurations of trauma embedded within the text.

In Memory for Forgetfulness,the historical imperative to bear witness to catastrophe falls upon the protagonist. However, the impossibility to fulfill this imperative is precipitated by three obstacles symptomatic of war: the banalization of violence, the lack of written evidence, and the inadequacy of language. As shells pummel the city and F16 airplanes rip through the sky, the orchestra of violence is simultaneously accompanied by the sounds of the mundane. Commercial advertisements for watches and cigarettes chime in between news-updates of the siege from the BBC or Radio Monte Carlo, sounding something like:

“Merit cigarette—more aroma, less nicotine!” “Citizen watches—for the correct time!” […] “Intensive bombardment of Beirut.”

The juxtaposition between the mundane and the extraordinary creates an unnatural alter-reality of emotion during a state of exception. This alter-reality of the mundane bewilders the protagonist as he sits trapped in his apartment amid the “uninterrupted chaos of shells.” However, when the destruction around him becomes ineffable, the very vocation of writing is questioned as it is incapable of bearing witness to catastrophe as it occurs. Hey says:

“Where is the newspaper? [...]Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?”

In the protagonist’s search for a form, he discovers that no such thing could bear witness to the catastrophe better than the destruction of the world around him, that is, the undoing of form itself. Finally, the protagonist blames language for its inability to be the interlocutor between the witness and the event. He says:

“I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic illusion.”

All that is left, the protagonist concludes, is to “write his silence.”

The reference to Hawi and his suicide surfaces behind this historical and literary context. It appears near the end of the novel, quite casually. Alone, it looks like a dedication or an elegy to the poet. However, the scene appears more like a nightmare that manifests within a recurring dream or flashback. Before I continue with this idea, I would like to briefly discuss how literary intersections and dialogic voices have been treated in modern Arabic literature. For this, I turn to Muhsin al-Musawi.

In Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition, Muhsin al-Musawi looks upon dedications as poetic intersections in which the poet calls precursors and contemporaries to his aid in moments of anxiety and identity crisis. For example, a poet like Adūnīs might invoke the name of al-Mutanabbī to inherit some power from his voice. Al-Musawi argues that dedicatory matter is a discursive strategy, similar to masks, contrafactions, parody, and irony. In other words, they allow for “epistemological dissociation with inherent lines of thought, regarding agency, time, history, class, and identity.” Edward Said described this as the process of creating filiative, social and political, relationships as opposed to affiliative ones, natural and biological. In his chapter on “Dedications as Poetic Intersections,” al-Musawi presents two poems by al-Bayātī dedicated to the tragic poet: “Elegy to Khalil Hawi” and “The Siege.” Both poems directly invoke Hawi in either the title or “in memoriam” and refer directly to his suicide. According to al-Musawi, Al-Bayātī strategically uses these poems to question the very vocation of poetry. However, al-Musawi’s explanation that dedications function as discursive strategy fits best with literature that intentionally and directly evokes the memory of the deceased, let us say in the preface or in the title. But when the memory of a precursor or contemporary haunts the pages of the text, the dedication is not so easily accounted for. This is precisely the case in Darwish’s novel.

In the title of my paper I use the homophonous terms sites of trauma (searching, locating, and staging) and traumatic sights (seeing, witnessing, experiencing). Thinking about the manifestation of Hawi’s suicide in Memory for Forgetfulness as a site and sight of trauma opens the door for a language and theory of trauma. This helps to explain scenes in the novel without dismembering them from the traumatic narrative around which they are framed. I consider Memory for Forgetfulness to be a traumatic narrative because it should first and foremost be read as a representation of the “collapse of witnessing,” something Cathy Caruth suggests, “that seems to inhabit all traumatic experiences.” Caruth explains that the “collapse of witnessing” is “the inability to fully witness the event as it occurs.” This collapse is first indicated by the title: Memory for Forgetfulness. The prescription presumes that the act of forgetting is impossible since memory of the traumatic event was never recorded as it occurred. Memory, in this case, is something material that must be reconstructed before it can be accessed. Before it can be forgotten it must be remembered. Perhaps through the work of remembering, by which I mean, compulsive repeating, flashbacks, and writing could the event be accessed, staged, and represented. This now brings us to the traumatic site/sight of Hawi’s suicide that haunts Memory for Forgetfulness. But before we can get there, we must find the stage.

The decent into the streets of Beirut is critical to the staging of traumatic events in Memory. The streets, characterized by danger, death, and destruction, serve as a network, that links the poet to various sights/sites of trauma. The protagonist exits the building in search of a newspaper and crosses the threshold of ‘safety’ into the open air of violence, “I don’t want to die under the rubble,” he says, “I want to die in the open street. And I walk on. I walk, to see myself walking, with firm steps, free even of my self, in the middle of the street, exactly in the middle. […] What am I searching for? Nothing.” I read this wandering through the city as a navigation through the network of traumatic sites/sights and the search for a newspaper as a searching for the “proverbial locus of trauma.” According to Tarek El-Ariss, “This quest for an impossible origin or undoing of the traumatic experience traps the subject into a structure of reenactment with multiple articulations.” I read the network of streets and alleys in Beirut as the structure, or stage, wherein the representation of traumatic experience is articulated.

Now, the stage is set and each act is a site/sight, an articulation, on the impossible trajectory towards the origin and undoing of trauma. Furthermore, I should mention that these sites/sights are accessed via particular affective cues: beneath a blanket of darkness that blinds, over sounds of explosions that deafen, and through smells of charred ash that suffocate, all issuing from and above the streets. For example, when the protagonist approaches the site/sight of Hawi’s suicide, the scene is painted with a sunset while, “Night, charcoal, and artillery shells come crashing down.” The affective elements force the protagonist down certain trajectories through the city. They take him from one node to the next, until he reaches the traumatic site/sight of Hawi’s balcony.

Now, my aim here is to demonstrate how Hawi’s manifestation in Memory is not a dedication separate from the rest of the novel. But rather, it is part and parcel of the traumatic network in the novel. The balcony on which Hawi committed suicide serves as the “proverbial locus of trauma” for this particular node in the network. In other words, it is the location where Darwish stages the traumatic event of Hawi’s suicide. The image of the balcony focuses into clarity when it crosses the protagonist’s line of sight as he searches for a place to go before the sunset. Here is how the reference begins:

“Over there is the balcony of the poet who foresaw the fall of everything and fixed a date for his own end. Khalil Hawi took a hunting rifle and hunted himself, not only because he wanted not to give evidence against anything but also because he wanted not to be a witness for or against anything. He was weary of the state of decay, weary of looking over a bottomless abyss.”

Now, to stop beneath the balcony and mourn the deceased invokes a significant motif of Classical Arabicpoetry. In fact, the beginning, or nasīb, of the Arabic Qaṣīdah is marked by the poet mourning over the remains of his beloved’s abandoned campsite. Michael Sells explains that the poet “recalls what is lost—both inciting its remembrance and calling it back.” However, when the protagonist stops beneath the poet’s balcony he recalls Hawi, as if summoning him back into the scene of his own suicide, but not as a dedication or invocation. Rather, the scene is recalled through a series of flashbacks and nightmares, each one triggering the next. The site/sight of the balcony instigates a peculiar memory of the two poets playing backgammon together, in which the protagonist commends Hawi’s existential investment in winning the game. At the end of the flashback there is a shift in perspective. The balcony is not only the site of the ruins (aṭlāl) anymore. But it is also the vantage point for sight (iṭlāl). New images that were inaccessible at first become possible. Aside from the view of Beirut and the American University clock tower, the protagonist claims that from the balcony one can peer into the abyss. Hawi, “the poet who foresaw the fall of everything,” is endowed with a promethean aura. This line is a reference to one of Hawi’s own poems, “Lazarus 1962,” a poem remembered for its prophetic foretelling of the naksa. It not only depicted the contradiction between the Arab dream and Arab reality, but also the consequences of their collision. Now, the protagonist stands on the balcony contemplating his own suicide. He says:

“I don’t want to look over his balcony. I don’t want to see what he did to himself on my behalf. The same idea occurred to me many times, but either it retreated, or I did.”

Though the scene does not end with the suicide of the protagonist, it does conclude with the murder of another poet, whose identity is unknown. This last flashback takes place four streets down from the balcony in which a poet, known as “the Wolf, the Gypsy, and the Lord of the Sidewalk,” is killed. In fact, Memory for Forgetfulness has many mysterious and anonymous poets and characters who haunt the text. However, Darwish does not name any except Hawi. These nameless and faceless poets are referred to as letters, for example Poet A or Poet Y.

For this reason, Hawi’s reference in Darwish’s novel is not simply a dedication to the poet. But, to invoke Caruth again, to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event. Let me then propose that the reference to Hawi is a traumatic symptom that manifests in line with the rest of the novel’s traumatic narrative framework: the protagonist in search of a way to “write his silence” throughout an entire novel is possessed by the image of the poet who wrote his silence with a rifle. But after all, “what’s poetry?” Mahmoud Darwish answers his own question: “Poetry is to write this cosmic silence, final and total.”

Thank you.

#Jil Jadid #Trauma

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poeticsofacademia · 10 years

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Are Citizen Journalist Images Democratic? Documenting Tahrir in "The Square"

Good morning. What I will talk about is the theoretical framework of a larger project that will be part of my Master’s thesis. Although today I focus mostly on Jehane Noujaim’s approach to the citizen journalist image in her documentary The Square, I will be considering other Egyptian films, as well as films from Iran, that accept or challenge the citizen journalist image in this larger project.

From the beginning of the revolution in early 2011 until I left Egypt in June 2013, I usually checked Twitter and Facebook for updates on protests in Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez, and political developments in general. But early on in the revolution, I realized not to take the images I saw on these sites for granted; Looking through and comparing the images, it always struck me how a particular protest in Tahrir Square, for example, could seem so different depending on the image or footage I saw, whether it was from state TV, news outlets like Al Jazeera, or Egypt’s OnTV channel, or if they were citizen journalist images. One protest could look enormous, small, filled with supporters of a particular political party, or full of children and families depending on the perspective and frame of the image or film clip.

I have thought a lot about images and representations of the Egyptian Revolution, and have been interested in how different filmmakers have chosen to portray these events, most recently after watching the recently Oscar-nominated film The Square. In this documentary, director Jehane Noujaim focuses on images, social media, and citizen journalism in the context of the Egyptian Revolution. Although Noujaim said that the film is the story of Tahrir Square and the political events that occurred there from January 25, 2011 to June 30 2013 and the narratives of several Egyptians who she documents, the film seems to be just as much a “documentary” about “the image” and citizen journalism and the roles they have played in the January 25 Revolution. In this way, Noujaim tells and enframes her story of Tahrir Square through social media and citizen journalism; from the beginning, we see the characters that the film follows watching the famous YouTube video of Asmaa Mahfouz calling people to go to the streets on January 25, 2011, and clicking through photos of Khalid Said’s horribly beaten body on the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page.

Noujaim’s focus on this aspect of the January 25 Revolution is another confirmation of how the inundation of citizen journalist images has drastically changed how we access information about current social and political movements and how participants in these events represent themselves. In discussions of citizen journalism, technology, and social media, scholars of media studies initially focused their examinations on whether or not they provided the spark or were the driving force behind protests. Scholars of the Middle East have pushed this further. They have argued that rather than initiating unrest, technology and social media provided tools with which already existing movements could mobilize more easily. Overall, scholars have praised citizen journalism for challenging dictatorial regimes and exposing their abuses. Before developments in technology, governments had, to a large extent, a monopoly over representation and image production. But now with the advent of mobile phone cameras, the Internet, and other new technologies, ordinary citizens have the power to document, represent, witness and challenge the state’s narrative. Technology has given birth to a new revolutionary: the citizen journalist.

In thinking about developments in technology and current political events – and in this case, the Egyptian Revolution – I’m interested in how citizen journalism has been linked, in a way, to ideas of democracy. New technologies seem to facilitate “democracy” in several ways. First, with the Internet and the mobile phone camera, it is now much easier to create and disseminate photos. And second, these technological developments seem to create an equal relationship between the creator of the image (they are citizen journalists) and the viewer or spectator of these images. This appears to create deterritorialized democratic communities – in which citizen journalists and spectators converse on a transparent, equal level. The idea of a democratic community, facilitated by these photos, proves convenient in the context of Middle-East wide – and if we take into consideration movements such as Occupy Wall Street – transnational struggles for democracy. As viewers of citizen journalist images, it is easy for us to identify with the citizen journalist and assume that he or she “sides” with us. He or she does note affiliate with a corporation, government, or particular ideology but provides an eye-witness, objective, and on-the-ground account – it is easy to believe that he or she has transparent, ethical intentions. In this way, citizen journalism implies an equal and trusting relationship between the viewer and the journalist and therefore the creation of a democratic deterritorialized community. This is all made possible by seemingly democratic images.

Director Jehane Noujaim continues this conversation of technology and citizen journalism throughout The Square. In the one and a half hour film – which was apparently cut from about 1600 hours of material – Noujaim depicts the major events of the Egyptian Revolution from January 25, 2011 to the June 30, 2013 protests that culminated in Mohammed Morsi’s ouster. While following the narratives of several Egyptians from different backgrounds and their experiences throughout this almost 2.5 year period, the film centers mostly on Midan al-Tahrir, Tahrir Square, and protests, sit-ins, gatherings, celebrations, and conversations between activists, and other events that occurred there. As I mentioned earlier, Noujaim’s story of Tahrir Square focuses on and is indebted to citizen journalist images. Citizen journalists’ efforts to highlight and spread awareness of the police and army’s abuses and the importance of recording and documenting are constant themes throughout the film. But not only are citizen journalist images and “documenting” important thematically, but the filmmakers drew heavily on citizen journalist footage in the making of the film itself. While discussing the production of The Square, Noujaim admits that the film would not have been possible without this footage. In an interview she and her producer Karim Amer did with the Huffington Post, Amer says, “The use of social media and citizen journalism is an attempt to show people that there is another narrative. History will not just be written by the victors. One person taking a photo can make an impact. When an image of a body being dragged makes its way to national media outlets, and then the Egyptian media is forced to address it, it makes a difference. Not only will people be killed but that’s the way the fight is taking place.”

The filmmakers’ reverence for citizen journalist images is echoed throughout The Square. In the film, we often see the main characters actively photographing and filming what they witness in the square. After they’ve filmed or photographed, moreover, we watch them uploading this footage onto YouTube. At one point in the film, we watch the first meeting of a popular media or citizen journalist group, organized by British-Egyptian actor Khaled Abdalla, one of the film’s main characters. Speaking with others in the meeting, Abdalla says “the battle is in the images and in the stories” and “as long as there’s a camera, the revolution will continue.” At another point in The Square we see a crowd gathered in front of a screen and a projector in Tahrir Square watching citizen journalist footage of the police violently breaking up protests. In one of the film’s final scenes, we watch Ahmed, armed triumphantly with a camera, heading to Tahrir to document what he sees.

The filmmakers’ approach to the citizen journalist image – both in their use of these images, documentation of citizen journalist revolutionaries and the formation of popular media groups – contributes to the line of thinking that, with citizen journalists’ help, we can achieve an objective and accurate understanding of the January 25 Revolution and what happened in Tahrir Square during that time. I find this approach to the citizen journalist image dangerous considering the power that the image has today; According to scholar Kari Anden Papadapolous “images are not just illustrators… but have increasing power to enact and perform in the social field and shape the collective imaginary of global populations and structure relations of global power.” Therefore, in ascribing the citizen journalist and his or her images this democratic authority, especially in light of the image’s power to shape collective imaginaries, we lose sight of the process that he or she engages in: documentation and representation. This authority is also unsettling considering the instances in which we hear accounts of doctored, misinterpreted, or misused citizen journalist footage. While scholars have highlighted the danger of the citizen journalist image – that, for example, citizen journalists are not just seeking to be heard but have a particular agenda in mind – the image itself has yet to be questioned.

So, in assuming that we as viewers engage with the citizen journalist on equal terms in this deterritorialized democratic space, their photos and footage are imbued with a sense of democracy, authority, and legitimacy. But if we consider the ease with which one can fabricate or alter images with programs like photo-shop, or claim the images as one’s own with copyright issues, the idea of a democratic or citizen image is problematic. Again, by ascribing the citizen journalist and his or images this democratic authority, we lose sight of the essential nature of the process that he or she engages in: documentation and representation. The mobile camera phone isn’t different from other types of cameras and image producing devices that people use to document – whether the professional cameras that Nouijam uses in her film, or the mobile phone cameras that several of the characters take with them to protests in Tahrir Square. But we have yet to include camera phone images and footage in our discussions of the photograph and documentary film’s limitations and problematic claims to represent truth.

Here, I draw on scholars of photography and film who have brought our attention to the limitations of the image in representing a historical reality. In her discussions of photography, Susan Sontag has reminded us to keep in mind what the two-dimensional photograph enframes and what it excludes. Bill Nichols pushes this further by challenging documentary film’s ability to represent reality; documentary film, he explains, “has a kinship with those other nonfictional systems that together make up what we may call discourses of sobriety… they are sobering because they regard their relation to the real as direct, immediate, transparent.” There is and will always be a separation between an image and the historical reality it refers to.

Scholars have challenged the image’s ability to represent since the camera was invented. Their critical discussions of the image have helped us as spectators approach photography and film critically and analytically. So why has the citizen journalist image fooled us? We may initially see advancements in film technology as shrinking the distance between the index (the mv4 file, YouTube video, DVD) and the spectator, steps towards a more equal relationship between the two and therefore a more democratic image and deterritorialized democratic space. In the context of citizen journalism, everyone who has a mobile phone camera has the power to become the director and cameraman simultaneously without having to rely on a film crew. We also assume that the situation or “scene” that citizen journalists photographs or films is informal and un-staged, and that the people he or she films as “non-actors” act (or “non” act) as themselves. Moreover, the “galleries,” “exhibitions,” or “theaters” in which the citizen journalist disseminates his or her photos or footage are unofficial social media spaces such as Twitter and Facebook, forums in which anyone with Internet access can view, enjoy, or criticize and do so anonymously. Not only can we access but we can easily keep and transport these images on our computers, phones, USB sticks, and hard-drives. This informality, access, and ease make it seem like the citizen journalist is our equal.

We have to re-think the image in light of this technology. With the arrival of digital technology, Laura Mulvey re-considered her earlier thoughts on film and viewership. In this, she advocates a “return to the semiotic theory of the index”; technology gives us – the viewers of images – the power to return and come into closer contact with the index, or the tangible footprint or shadow of the image; the DVD or mv4 file. Returning to the index makes us reconsider Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the audience watching a film in a theater in comparison to a play. Writing in 1936 when Adolf Hitler was the chancellor of Germany, and in an effort to describe a theory of art that would “be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art,” Benjamin described the cinema experience as democratic, as everyone becomes a critic. In comparison to the theater, film was democratic, as it seemed to offer more in terms of perspective. Yet now with technology that allows us to return to the index, we realize the very undemocratic nature of the movie theater experience and how we have become passive consumers of film; not only are we unable to pause, fast-forward, or rewind the film, but we remain confined to our seats and thus one perspective. We have no control over the index at all.

Laura Mulvey’s return to the index precedes the January 25 Revolution and more recent developments in image technology and discussions of citizen journalism. Yet following Mulvey’s example and returning to the index allows us to discover that the photo or film inevitably has a bias, distance, frame, and particular perspective.

In order for a democratic and equal relationship, the viewer must not simply accept a role as a spectator, but as an active citizen whose opinion remains crucial and who constantly challenges claims to truth, representation and national narrative. In order for this to happen, the viewer has to take an active role in his or her viewing experience and enter into a critical discussion with and challenge the index (DVD, cassette, mv4 file, Youtube video).

With regards to The Square, Jehane Noujaim and the characters in her film accept and celebrate citizen journalist images and but do not necessarily question the image’s authority, perspective, or objective claims to truth in their own use of images in this image war. Although they acknowledge the fact that the revolution is very much a battle of images – in which they are taking part –this is never challenged or questioned. When re-watching footage of what happened in Tahrir Square, or commenting on citizen journalist images they find on the Internet, the characters never discuss the limited perspective of the images. As viewers, we are never asked or prompted to challenge the frame, or think about how it might be problematic that the 1.5 hour film itself is cut down from 1600 hours of footage. Therefore, a practice of citizen spectatorship would encourage a more engaged and less passive approach to film and allow the spectator to engage with the citizen journalist on more equal terms. Media theorist Neil Postman has pointed to how the image has redefined society’s understanding of truth and information, remarking how “truth is in the seeing, not in the thinking.” For the idea of citizen journalism to create a democratic, deterritorialized cultural space, there must also be a practice of citizen spectatorship in which the image and the index are constantly challenged and questioned.

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