Tell me, did you see the news?

On politics, identity, art, history, resistance and poetry.

“I don’t think that you can be an artist of this world if you don’t have anything to say about it, and especially if you don’t have anything to say about the cruelty of it.”

- Fariha Róisin

“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm’s reach.”

-John Berger (Ways of Seeing)

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash.

These days, the act of looking, of holding truth buckles my knees. I see the blood on the map, I see the war machine. I live far from the violence and bombs, but I still hear the piercing screams. I still hear the desperate pleas. I live on a tiny island, distant from most of humanity, but there is a collectivism in the pain we share, in the very air we breathe. I ask the red sky for peace, I ask the blue sky for peace.

- Words by me.

I think of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s poem “what they did yesterday afternoon” often.

what they did yesterday afternoon
-Warsan Shire

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who used to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

I think of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s poem “Awake”, which landed in my email inbox last week. Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

Awake for longer than forever
and since before eternity
my waking is the wave that froths and foams

Awake in hymns and the mailmen’s passion
Awake in a house that will be destroyed
in a grave that machines will dig up:
My country is the wave that froths and foams

Awake so that the colonizers might leave
Awake so that people can sleep
“Everyone has to sleep sometime,” they say
I am awake
and ready to die

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These days, I have just finished reading “The Girl from Revolution Road” by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, a beautiful book of personal essays about the author’s experience growing up in New Zealand as an Iranian immigrant.

I am contemplating an uncomfortable fact I return to, again and again. For a lot of humans, being political is not a choice but a part of inherited identity. If you are a refugee, for example, a large part of your identity as a human being is already politicised. If you are an immigrant, your identity is also politicised.

Golbakhsh speaks so eloquently to the fact that for refugees or first-generation immigrants, there is also an expectation that one must “earn” their right to citizenship. Why are some of us entitled to citizenship, safety and basic human rights while others are not?

“There is a myth of the dutiful immigrant who must be grateful for having been allowed into the country and no matter what occurs they must not venture beyond that role… It is similar to the equally problematic myth whereby minorities such as immigrants are expected to achieve more than the average population. The myth revolves around the idea that immigrants must prove their worth for having been given the privilege of living here, unlike the rest of the population who do not need to question that privilege.”

-Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, The Girl From Revolution Road

For others like myself, born into a “safe” country, as the “dominant” culture (white, in a settler colony) being political is somehow seen as a choice. But it is a privilege to be apolitical.

Politics is a dirty word in many a mouth, I am well aware. It is associated with corruption, ego, power and blatant narcissism, (or even psychopathy or sociopathy) if we are to look at certain world leaders and members of parliament in all of our countries (and the bloody stories of history).

The word “politics” originates from the Greek word "πολιτικά" (politika), which apparently means “affairs of the city” or “things related to the polis”. The Greek word polis referred to a city-state or a community of citizens. Thus the term politika was used to describe the art and science of governing a given community.

Politika from Greek became politica in Latin which became politique in French and the word politics finally entered the English language in the 15th century.

By its simplest definition, the word means the science or art of governance.

Perhaps we don’t all have to be concerned with governance per se. Or perhaps we should be. To me, (and I will admit that I am a Political Science major) politics is just about the organisation and the rights of people, thus we are all political. To me, human rights are not up for debate.

I have not grown up knowing war or revolution or political instability, nor have I ever been a minority. But I am grateful for the stories told and shared by my fellow homosapiens from all around the globe. Stories teach us empathy. Ghazaleh Golbakhsh’s collection of essays not only expanded my empathy but also educated me about some of Iran’s history and Persian culture. I learnt about the Revolution there and politics of the last century. This book showed me a glimpse of the experience of being a woman between worlds and ideologies.

Through this book, I found Shirin Neshat and her incredible work. I am profoundly moved by her storytelling and exploration of what it is to be a woman in exile, and a woman holding up a mirror to reflect both oppression within her homeland (of women in particular under current Iranian governance) and oppressive and reductive stereotypes in the West of what it is to be an Iranian woman. The Middle East has been misrepresented, especially since 9/11, as a land of Islamic extremism, and both Neshat and Golbakhsh unravel this assumption and stereotype with nuanced discussions of the chador, for example, and its political and religious history.

Part of her famed collection Women of Allah, Shirin Neshat’s powerful Rebellious Silence photo in particular dares us to challenge our assumptions of Islamic women.

In the words of Dr. Allison Young:

“Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of Allah examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing cultural landscape in the Middle East—both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction…

The Women of Allah series confronts this “paradoxical reality” through a haunting suite of black-and-white images. Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun, the text, and the gaze. While these symbols have taken on a particular charge since 9/11, the series was created earlier and reflects changes that have taken place in the region since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.”

More of this series can be found here.

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To Get Political:

Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash

In this 21st century, we are bearing witness to multiple genocides and wars that make certain elites incredibly rich. The war machine has always been a profitable capitalist endeavour - funded by the taxpayer in Western nations. My eyes were opened to the horrors and corruption of the world and the systems in which we reside a long time ago, long before my critical Humanities studies at a liberal university in the capital here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

I had an incredibly critical and political American English teacher in High School who pierced through all illusions of nationalism, and patriotism engineered by Western empires. He also made us aware of the hypocrisies of nations (I should just say blatantly here, his nation, the United States) that profess to be champions of human rights, whilst violating them in every way possible in foreign territories. One only has to investigate colonial history to see this.

There is no beautiful way to point out the darkness of this world. What I have always been particularly interested in are the cultural mythologies that nations tell their citizens to justify all sorts (of warfare, etc). I’m getting political - but I think we must all be, as we witness in real-time, through our screens, various horrors unfold that will be documented in history books.

Geopolitical affairs are complicated, sure - but are human rights complicated? Is the mass murder of children that complicated? Is the stealing of land and oppressing of a people that complicated? It becomes “complicated” only when we consider a history of colonisation and interventions, and certain countries like Britain declaring new borders and countries over existing countries or populations (the nation-state of Israel over ancient Palestine).

Remember that the Westphalian nation-state system is not that old, and borders are just lines in the sand made up by European empires that decided the world was theirs to claim, own and control several hundred years ago. This was all for power and resource extraction, to benefit not the general population in say, Great Britain or any other European empire, but to benefit the elite at the very top of the food chain. The masses/working class and poor in Europe were also being exploited in their labour - and yes, I agree with Marx and his precise critiques of capitalism.

I lament this (colonial) worldview and have spent years attempting to decolonise my own mind (it is an ongoing process). In the words (paraphrased) of Jane Goodall, as a species, we are destroying our own habitat (and each other). What I believe is this - we have more in common than we do in difference. Every mystic and poet from every corner of the earth across millennia declares the same truth - that this Earth is a family of things. What I also believe in my core is that this Earth is a living, breathing thing, a mother to all, not a resource to be extracted, a casino, or a garbage can.

Borders are one of our biggest problems, it seems, as a species. I remember writing an Anthropology paper many years ago for my studies at university about the ambiguity of borders - in their assertion and audacity.

I need not go on an academic rant - but I will say this:

- can we not use the enormity of our collective imagination and creative intelligence as individuals and as a species to imagine a more just, kinder world for everyone in it?

I don’t have answers for how we create world peace or ceasefires - but where I am finding tiny pieces of hope in my recent despair is in the resistance efforts of artists around the globe who believe in a revolution of these oppressive systems - who believe in a more just world - who believe that humanity can be better.

In this way, poetry and art are not luxuries but more vital than ever (for survival of these times! for resistance!) as we live through these days and these years that will be smeared in blood in future history books.

• Here I would love to share Palestinian artist Malak Mattar’s beautiful artwork - but as I do not have explicit permission, here is the link to her website and her Instagram for you, dear reader, to check out.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

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I also want to share some other heart-breaking and important things I have read and watched over the last week and a half…

This article called Letters From Gaza, with this essay by Nowar Diab (a student at Al-Azhar University).

“Next is the hardest part of my daily routine. I contact my friends one by one to check if they are still alive. I have to prepare myself mentally before I start messaging them. I do this out of habit, although I know it is in vain. I feel very anxious wondering whether I will ever get a response back…

…My phone rings again. It is the same friend. I pick up and this time we are connected. ​“Is it true that Maimana and her family have been killed?” My heart falls and shatters into a million little pieces. ​“No, no. Who said that?” I reply, while tears fill my eyes. ​“Everyone,” he said back to me. I scream and the tears start falling from my eyes.

This is the second time in as many weeks that I get the news about losing a loved one. The first time was my dear friend Abraham. He was unlike anyone else: funny, clever and with such a big heart. I can’t describe the feeling when you get this type of news. It’s shattering — like when you drop a plate and it breaks into many pieces…

…It always gets worse at nighttime. That is when the horror begins. We all sleep together in the same room, because it feels safer. I try to sleep through the noises of heavy bombing sounds and news reports on the radio.”

Hala Aylan’s words pierce and haunt, as they should:

“The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.”

As do Fariha Róisin’s words:

“What would it mean to accept that the Holocaust of Jewish peoples was not the only extermination that was barbaric, that all genocides are, including these current ones? Six million people have died in Congo in the last 15 years… how can we side by side accept one death as deplorable but the other as a necessity?”

• Letters from Gaza - by Sherell Barbee and people from Gaza

• Letter From Gaza: "Birdsong One Minute, Missiles the Next" by Eman Ashraf Alhaj Ali

• Art Against Occupation by Matt A. Hanson about Malak Mattar’s work

• For a history recap - The Rights of Israel by Professor Joseph Massad

• Heba Zagout, We Will Not Forget You

• The Yessification of Kamala Harris, by the brilliant Fariha Róisin

• A garden blooms every time I look at you by Fariha Róisin and Hala Alyan

• Hala Alyan: Why must Palestinians audition for your empathy?

• Growing Up Muslim in a Post-9/11 World by Fariha Róisin

• Perhaps you are twelve - a haunting poem by Sondos Alqadri

• This Is Us - a six-part documentary series by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh

• Art in Exile - Ted Talk by Shirin Neshat

• 'Dreams Are Where Our Fears Live' - Tate/Shirin Neshat Video

• Iranian artist Shirin Neshat on her life in exile and her latest work “The Fury” | TED Radio Hour - a beautiful interview

• The Film Women Without Men - by Shirin Neshat

Other references:

Merriam-Webster. (2019). Definition of POLITICS. Merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics

politic | Etymology, origin and meaning of politic by etymonline. (n.d.). Www.etymonline.com. https://www.etymonline.com/word/politic

politics, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). Oed.com. https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//3716710813

With love,

Lau

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