This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

by J.M. Coetzee

Welcome to this sorrowing land, whose literary image is so much more beautiful than its present reality.

There are now those who are dancing on the graves of our dead, and who consider our Nakba their festival.

But the Nakba is not a memory; it is an ongoing uprooting, filling Palestinians with dread for their very existence. The Nakba continues because the occupation continues. And the continued occupation means a continued war. This war that Israel wages against us is not a war to defend its existence, but a war to obliterate ours.

A wall not to separate Palestinians from Israelis, but to separate Palestinians from themselves and from any view of the horizon. Not to separate history from myth, but to weld together history and myth with a racist ingenuity.

Life here is less than life, it is an approaching death.

He has to use the word to resist the military occupation. And he has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the repetitive. How can he achieve literary freedom in such slavish conditions?

A literature born of a defined reality is able to create a reality that transcends reality – an alternative, imagined reality. Not a search for a myth of happiness to flee from a brutal history, but an attempt to make history less mythological, to place the myth in its proper, metaphorical place, and to transform us from victims of history into partners in humanising history.

Thank you for your brave initiative to break the psychological siege inflicted upon us. Thank you for resisting the invitation to dance on our graves. Know that we are still here, that we still live.