Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

by Isabella Hammad

The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it. Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives. Yet this narrative sense remains with us, flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.

there is a relationship between novels and what for want of a better phrase you might call our spiritual lives. Some of us read them for comfort, or to escape; some to learn about the world; some because it’s a rare chance for concentrated solitude, to be neither working nor passively consuming the content of a screen but thinking deeply about experiences other than our own using some of the tools of our dream life, and listening carefully to the voices of others, in ways that ask for our imaginative participation and that might also shed light upon our own experiences of being alive on this planet.

Man is not just flesh and blood, says the protagonist, in a flash of insight: man is a cause. What this means is that it is not enough for the bonds of personal and political identity to be passively inherited but that they must be imprinted with intention and will.

Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.

How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?

The Palestinian struggle has gone on so long now that it is easy to feel disillusioned with the scene of recognition as a site of radical change, or indeed as a turning point at all.

But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.

Cultural recognition of difference can form the basis of just societies, but recognition that remains solely that—a form of acknowledgment without economic and political redistribution—is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony.

The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?

To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial.

Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts, but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift, to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.

Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honoring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.

We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.

It also signified a paradigm shift: it showed that a system in which one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither.

As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called. I wonder what reality you now live in. From the point in time at which you read this, what do you say of the moment I am in? How large is the gulf between us?

Somewhere recently humanity seems to have crossed an invisible line, and on this side naked power combined with the will to profit threaten to overwhelm the collective interests of our species.

“Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”