www.SteinbergRecherche.com
|
|
Steinberg Recherche Referent Texte 2007 Texte 2006 Texte 2005 Texte 2004 Texte bis 2003 Karten Bilder Suchen Home
Hamid SkifMemory
and Violence
To Abdul-Jabbar Al Koubaysi, Iraqi writer and journalist imprisoned and tortured for 15 months by the American Army, accused of being a “dangerous politician.” Translated
by Cullen Goldblatt I write and this writing belongs to a memory which cannot be
reduced to my person. I am the product of a history. How much I would like to
settle for even the limited territories of my life’s incidents, to the events
which have fashioned my being, this would be a simplified view, amputated from
the vastness and background that brought me to writing, to shouting and fighting
for justice. I went to write against injustice because we must always affirm
ourselves against something else. To fight for is not so different except
that it implies one has not defined one’s adversary, has left it vague,
whereas against gives a sense of the
strength that would be deployed to bring down that adversary and finish him off,
if there were the means and the time. I would like to evoke here the place of violence in my
memory, what positions it inculcated in me, the traces it left, and those it
stamps on a writing that is shared between past and present. I was born in Oran, the city of the Plague, but my own Oran
was not the one described by Camus, whom my fellow citizens reproach for having
bestowed our city with a sinister reputation. I agree with them on this point,
so it must temper the admiration I have for the author of Exile and The
Kingdom. In the inequitably shared Oran of the 1950s, I came into this
world in the negro village, baptized thus by the colonists, and as New City by
the Algerians. We lived on the edge of the quarter, separated from the beautiful
apartments of our pied-noir neighbors
by a boulevard that marked the border between the dominators and the dominated. Fanon wrote in
The Wretched of the Earth that the “zone where the natives live is not
complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed,
but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rule of Aristotelian
logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation
is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers' town is a
strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the
streets are covered with asphalt … The settler's town is a well-fed town, an
easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers' town is a
town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people,
or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is
a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it
matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It
is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of the other … It is a town of niggers and
bicots.”[1] This is the boulevard which will be, throughout my early
childhood, the symbol of the violence which was done to us since it forbade me
paradise. If the boulevard marked the territory that was allotted us, school,
where the teachers were all French, had as its function to normalize us. It was
the concern of a “native” school, thus named because it welcomed only the
children from the negro village. Between its walls, it was only a question of
learning the French language and cherishing the mother county which was
civilizing us. Moreover, our ancestors were Gaulois,
while the Mediterranean was that great river that crossed through France.
Shining as brightly as new pennies so as not to shame our parents, the simplest
thing was to drone our way through these truths fallen from heaven. At home, it
was another story. We remained Algerians somehow and it was necessary, because
of this, to pay one’s way and wake at dawn to go to Koranic school which
preceded French school each morning. I therefore grew up within a duality,
shared between two worlds and two violences which stamped themselves, their
damages and identities, upon my gait and my body. You find a portion of my
biography in the portraits drawn up by Fanon or Albert Memmi, themselves born
from the same colonial tragedy. That it is to say, I am so familiar with violence because I
consumed it with my mother’s milk and so much of my life was, from my first
steps, marked/imbued with it. I lack the imagination for inventing the life that
would have been mine if I had been born in a society without a negro village,
without a boulevard-boundary, and without schools which waged continual war on
our bodies and our spirits. At French school, one had to set at the table to learn and at
Koranic school one put one’s thin buttocks on the mat, itself set on the
ground, and one read off the wooden slate while shouting louder than the others,
to gain the attention of the master. His long stick pursued the recalcitrant
ones, lashing the air in search of the guilty one’s head. The indescribable
entangling of our bodies served to heat us. I have often heard it said that learning the Arabic language
is difficult. I invariably respond: do you believe that learning a Western
language is easier for child of Africa or Asia? Why would that task be gentler,
less exacting? I must however admit that it was easier for me to learn the
complicated rules of the French language than those of my mother tongue, for one
simple reason. They were presented in a pleasant package, accompanied by
corrections in red pen, and sometimes, when the pupil in question had
disregarded the bounds of scholarly conduct, a stinging slap given by the
perfumed hand of a teacher so elegant that one must have been crazy to make her
angry. At Koranic school, by contrast, the lesson started off with
warming-up voices taking up the verse of the previous day and finished with the falaqa,
a punishment given to the candidate of the day who feet were held up by the
sturdiest of the other pupils, while the master crashed down upon the soles of
the feet of the recipient, his sentence the striking of the stick. One got back
on to one’s suffering feet, bent on avenging, in one way or another, this
pedagogy of the bludgeon. I also remember showings at the cinema when one had to, in
order to enter the darkened theater, show one’s hands and submit one’s ears
for inspection. One’s body had been well scrubbed with the coarse horsehair
glove which our mother knew how to handle so well, there were days when we were
deprived of the movies for the simple reason that the number of pied-noir
children was too large for the natives to find a place. We were sent back
without further ado. The war, which tattooed my body and disrupted the family
saga, spread its sinister wings over my childhood during those years, but I
believe it is the most stinging memory of humiliation that I retain from that
apartheid which never dared say its name. The
Globalized Writer One of the strongest feelings that writing gives is that of
liberty. I must say it: to write is to be free. And I believe that, throughout
the world, writers have more reason to say this. Writing teaches and liberates.
It is the risk one takes for oneself, but also for others, because it is a
responsibility. One discovers and is uncovered in a battle which engages our
beliefs, our ideas, and plunges us into a danger of betraying ourselves, or of
falling on the battlefield of illusion and lost causes, when not from the
bullets of assassins.
I come from a county where we wrote at risk of our lives, a county where
poets were assassinated, and not only by the fundamentalists, but also by the
political police, as was the case of Jean Senac, and by the colonial army, among
whose victims were Red Houhou and Ali Riahi, hanged from a tree.
Between exil and assassination, between burial in silence and in
repression, my country has provided her share of evidence towards the idea that
one can order the deaths of men of letters. I feel this fact confers a
heightened responsibility, a more intense urgency. It closes the door on
dishonest compromises with silence and obliges one to look reality in its face
in a world in which symbolic violence is not far from violence itself.
Barbarity has taken a heavy toll on Algerian writers. This does not
authorize us more than any others to close our eyes and look for peace at any
cost, because we know the peace of cemeteries and know where dishonest
compromises and prevarications lead. It is perhaps for this reason that we are
so vehement, that even the youngest among us in this new generation which
complicates ideas about the past, prefabricated discourse, and the stilted
language of the old ones, do no abdicate nor disown the battle in which each
word counts, in which each book “is worth its weight in powder” as Kateb
Yacine says.
A discourse about literature is not useful unless it has as its
objective, not to chloroform nor embellish a reality which is sufficient unto
itself, but to indicate sign posts and to structure argumentation that would not
exist without literature itself. It is for this reason that I mistrust it. Very
often it is those who discuss whom are honored instead and in place of those who
practice the craft.
It is these artisans, proud masons at work with the mortar of words, who
are confronted today by the globalization of writing through this process which
is sweeping the entire planet in a continual depreciation of ideas and
intellectual production, just as it is doing with merchandise.
In this world economy, instead of it being the divorce between
anticipation and reality, it is communication which determines the price of
merchandise, not any longer its value. The more “noise” one makes, the
higher price it sells for. What counts from now on is not the amount of time
that has passed since the production of the object, but the “value” that the
industry, the marketing, has attached to it. What counts, is the primary measure
of the merchandise, for what is sold is less a physical product, than the brand
or the prestige associated with it. It is therefore a matter of manufacturing
more and more cheaply since the real profits result from the publicity created
around the product, as Daniel Cohen points out.
We others, writers, do we escape this process? Are we on the path to
globalization or are we already globalized, since our books are articles of
merchandise subject to the laws of the market, as are our clothes, our shoes,
our tobacco?
It is not easy to respond to this question. It irritates our ego and
makes it uneasy. But there is the truth. We have become, in passing of the
years, confused and docile clients of the commodification of the spirit, this
totalizing modernity that reduces literature, thought, science, discourse,
mores, and morality, to often no more than the justification for the nonsensical
actions of the powerful. Everywhere, in the economy as in the domain of justice,
in foreign policy as in the conduct of social arrangements, it is the rule of an
unbridled free market liberalism which sets the rules and laws. This new
totalitarianism that closely resembles communism in many respects leaves no
space for refusal. Refused in advance, all contestation is treated as
reactionary… In this system, 50 million rich people have the wealth of 2.7
billion poor people.
This modernity which abolishes identities, the borders between human and
animal, participates in the growth of barbarianism, in the celebration of
murders conducted by other means. With Clausewitz, we had believed that war was
politics pursued by other means. In our time, it is politics that has
transformed itself into war pursued in civilian life.
It has institutionalized violence as the method of governance and
anticipation as the mode of functioning of a world society suspended between
decisions: one awaits, in a jumble, the outcome of the G8 summit, the meeting of
the Security Council, the publication of the unemployment statistics, a job, the
resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the end of the famine in
Ethiopia, or the invention of a vaccine for menopause.
To write the world today is to confront oneself with the real, at the
risk of losing one’s footing in the maelstrom produced by the confrontations
that are bloodying the planet. How to close one’s eyes on the violence, on the
loss of landmarks and the despair which sweeps through millions of people and
mutilates their awareness of being human? How to be quiet in the face of the
totalitarianism of money and lies constructed to be a form of governance?
The war which is soaking Iraq in blood is only the beginning of a still
vaster tragedy which risks encompassing the whole region. One can already
distinguish the noise of boots behind the threats uttered against Syria and
Iran, in a cacophony in which bad faith and the irrational argue the vendetta,
while the peoples dream only of shrugging off the yoke that traps them in the
fatality of the confrontation with political and social suffering.
It is enough that the embargo which was declared upon an Iraq subject to
the cruel rule of a dictatorship had no other objective but to lead the country
into its current state. If that is not the case, how is one to understand the
lack of independence of the international organizations which then serve to
screen expansionist aims, which are themselves fed by a discourse posing
neocolonialism as the panacea for all the ills of the third world?
How to understand the pillage of Iraqi wealth through the United Nations
commission that addresses war damages and reparations, while no other country
has had to submit to analogous treatment, and how, above all, to understand the
incompetence of one calls “the international community” before an embargo
that decimated tens of thousands of children and the bombing of civilian
populations with the aide of illegal weapons of whose effects remain unknown.
Does all of this distance us from literature or is all this a part of
literature?
America is at war against Arabs since the Americans decided to colonize
the oil of the Middle East. It is for this reason that the Arab peoples (for me,
this notion does not invoke an idea of ethnicity, but rather of culture) ask
themselves if they have not inherited a curse.
Governed by dictatorial and corrupt regimes, with the notable complicity
of America and Europe,* plunged into underdevelopment, they see their children
flee the soil of their birth in search of a better life in that West which sends
them back a single image, including them all in a single infamy: all terrorists.
From The
Image to Illness While the image has evolved, the picture of the Arab and the
Muslim that lives in the Western collective imagination is one of a frustrated,
violent, intolerant, and fatalist being who does not respect women in the least.
With the image of the money-hungry and lust-filled sheik in literature
and film, one passes through the end of the 70s to arrive at the Arab lunatic
brandishing, no longer a scimitar, but a Kalashnikov, in order to impose the
theocracy for which he prays.
A product of the trauma that followed the fall of the Roman Catholic
Empire and the expansion of Islam, this image will be given forceful new life
with the colonial conquests.
A whole literature presenting the Muslim as resistant to progress will be
reactivated to serve the moral and scientific supports of colonization. The
Muslim will be dehumanized in calling upon a rhetoric of bestiality. Fanon,
again, remembered in his reflections on colonial violence that “the
colonist’s terms, when he mentions the colonized, are zoological terms”. One
makes reference to “the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter,
of breeding swarms, of foulness, of gesticulations”.[2]
The colonist, when he wants to describe accurately and employ the very best
words, refers constantly to the animal.
I have often had occasion to deplore the representation of Arabs and
Muslims in media in general, and in pedagogical texts in particular. It is an
old story. Thus, school texts teach children that Muslims turn five times a day
toward the Kaaba to exalt Allah without stating that this is the name of God in
Arabic.
For the majority of readers, Allah is a different god than that of the
Jews and the Christians. It is a matter regarding people who are outside of the
Judeo-Christian culture and one must – it is in the natural order of things
– civilize it. But do not be ungrateful, Occident-centrism does not concern
only you. It includes, with a striking generosity, African, Asian, and
Amer-Indian civilizations.
Since the attacks of September 11, this imaginary has enjoyed great
success. For some thousands of fundamentalists, it is all the Muslims of the
world at whom the accusing finger has been pointed, who have been reduced to
being perceived only as the dormant cells of a planetary conspiracy. This image
is not a theoretical viewpoint; it reflects the reality of the feelings of
Muslims and of people who identify with that culture.
Today, in part because of this amalgam, many Arab intellectuals live in a
state of great uneasiness. Some revel in double talk. They refuse to condemn
religious leaders who are stuck in messianic rhetoric because the religious
imbues social life and thought, but also because of the diffuse and omnipresent
feeling that the rights of Arab peoples are not to be taken seriously. Following
from this fact, they develop a discourse intended for external consumption which
condemns all violence and yet, by remaining quiet, does not disapprove of it at
home.
The failure of the nationalist or Pan-Arab project of the 1960s, the ebb
of progressivism, and of Marxist trends, stranded Arab intellectuals in a
swamp-like area in which she or he who makes progress risks sinking into
isolation. For some, it appeared better to stay immobile, or to seal oneself in
a rhetoric that would have been perceived, not long before, as a sign of
cerebral retardation. Ten years ago, an Algerian writer, known for his Marxist
involvement, declared that Islam was the solution to all
problems. He had just discovered the magical powder of intelligence.
It never occurred to anyone that this writer could so easily go from
communism to fundamentalism without passing by the psychiatric hospital. This
type of behavior only affects Arab intellectuals, though a number of their
Western peers, and some very respected, have subscribed to the church or
synagogue, finding their bearings in a religiosity that is more and more
demanding, the product of a double evolution: on one side, a generalized
skepticism in which all opinions are equally valuable; on the other, the
development of very rigid religious beliefs that accompany the escalation of
superstitions.
In Cairo, Naguib Mahfouz, the sole Arab winner of the Nobel Prize in
literature who has failed to be lose his life following a fundamentalist attempt
upon it, did he not in the end ask Al-Azhar’s religious authority to give his
blessing to the re-printing of “Son of Medina,” one of his novels that had
been published and read in the 1960s despite the criticisms of the religious
leaders? The incident prompted a few protests, but nothing more.
It is this submission to the moral order, this deafening silence before
the mounting of the inquisition that I denounce. This inquisition, practiced by
partially educated religious leaders, supported by corrupt powers which seek
religious legitimization, finds its counterpart in the West where the unspoken
religiousness appears as soon as one grazes the surface polished by years of a
surface separation between Church and State.
In the Arab countries, the intellectual, the writer, occupies a place
that I dare not qualify as secondary, unless he is exploited before he is put
away in prison. He does not have the right to a chapter unless he serves to
justify a political agenda or to gild the prince’s coat of arms. The number of
Arab writers of renown who have chosen to live abroad is an indicator of the
misery of literature in our countries, where even the greatest among us – and
I refer once again to Naguib Mahfouz – does not sees the size of one print-run
surpass 5,000 copies.
This state of social, cultural, and political decline added to the
dangers which weigh on those who refuse to follow religious dogmas, explains, in
large part, the hesitation of thinkers to question taboos in societies in which
the religious leaves an individual life only the right to affirm his allegiance
to values shared by the lowest common denominator.
This religiosity-refuge, this sanctuary for all phantasms, this place in
which lost dreams of grandeur are realized and where flight from the world’s
complex reality ,has become the measuring stick by which Arab society evaluates
itself and judges its members. This society, forced back into its retrenchments,
in which television interrupts its programs to air the call to prayer, is only
capable of questioning its structures and its way of life through violence.
Suffering from a lack of mechanisms for dialogue and a lack of legitimization of
power outside of the religious domain, this society in which political parties
are often empty shells, invests timidly in the mastery of modern technology,
thus throwing a kind of technological veil of the chasms of retardation.
I mean by this that technological expertise, at which a segment of Arab
youth has shown its skill, does not correlate with a broad and profound movement
of society, as was the case in Japan at the beginning of the 20th
century. The adoption of modern technologies, is it adequate to masque the
immense gap that separates the dominant thinking in Arab societies from that of
developed societies?
The retardations accumulated by Arab countries – regarding this, look
at the figures produced from the investigations carried out by the United
Nations Development Program – cannot be explained solely by foreign
domination. They have endogenous causes, which forces us to question not only
the current regimes, but also our own attitudes. The violence of such
questioning cannot perhaps be disconnected from the destruction that is the life
of the Arab writer, since he must denounce, in one motion, the humiliating
political hegemony of the Western nations towards the Arab countries and the
Third World, and the death paralysis of his own society, aggravated as it is by
reactionary visions that take from religion only its surface, and makes that
surface into the essence of a religious thought reduced to literalness. Dialogue Or
The Plague Shaken by the eruption of terrorist violence, in moment of
great crisis, Western societies seek the advice of specialists who are entrusted
with clarifying such or such phenomenon. A commendable demand in itself, but a
costly one because it dispenses with a true debate and understands shortcuts to
be the fundamentals of an explanation. An army of experts, of greater or lesser
skill, is thus urgently mobilized to clarify, explain, and diagnose, standing
themselves at the bedside of Islam.
Among the experts, the West selects a few natives to provide the
arguments that it prefers. Their discourses lack neither the folkloric element,
nor the spicy details, before creating local color. One has thus seen appear
several charlatans who, having only the vaguest of connections with the reality
of the terrain, flood media platforms to present as they like their reheated
explanations and their analyses made from bits of odds and ends.
The work necessary for housing a dialogue of mutual respect is, on the
other hand more difficult. It requires both parties to exercise a veritable
pedagogy of knowledge, a more serious approach that begins with work on the gaze
that we bring to each other, absent the blinders, the clichés, and the mutual
contempt.
This is a difficult, arduous, task, but a much more productive one than
those shows which intends to erase centuries of ignorance in a few minutes. One
example: the destruction of the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan by the members
of the Taliban was presented as an expression of Muslim fanaticism which allowed
for no human representation. All over, one heard only this refrain. Nobody, I
repeat nobody, thought it necessary to pose the question of why these statues
had survived fourteen centuries of Islam, just until the day on which the
so-called visionaries – whose arrival to power had been applauded and
supported by the USA – decided to dynamite them.
It is this type of questioning that would open the door to dialogue and
diminish the unloading of the generalities, approximations, and overused clichés
upon a culture whose contribution to the universal occurred well before
scholastic texts would have it. As Monsigneur Claverie, the bishop of Oran who
was assassinated in 1996, said, true dialogue consists of accepting the idea
that the other holds a truth that I do not have.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is at the heart of the Arab and
Muslim consciousness, constitutes the hard nugget of thought and non-thought, to
paraphrase the eminent scholar of Islamic thought Muhammad Arkoun, perhaps
cannot be brought to an end, as long as one can speak of violence in the world.
It is the matrix of this violence, its primary source today.
Let us imagine that tomorrow Israel were to withdraw from the Palestinian
territories it has occupied since 1967, in spite of dozens of never-applied UN
resolutions. Just imagine. What would remain of the arguments of those who
dialogue with bombs and weapons. If the power of writers is not in making war,
they have at least that of imagining peace. So, let us wear away at this power,
in order to dispense justice to all the victims of despoilments and let us cease
to cling, all of us, to our fears and fantasies.
Admitting that the myths which live within us are the bases of our fears,
that the destructive violence which unrelentingly attempts to make man his own
worst enemy is the product of legends we have carried since humanity’s first
stammerings, and let us cease to dress our phantoms in the flashy garb of a
discourse on democracy and progress, thus justifying pillage and destruction.
For three years, democracy has descended upon Iraq, replacing a
dictatorial regime with ruins, and we writers of the world, what have we done,
what do we do to put an end to this organized and planned devastation? I do not
think we can escape our obligation to the truth, and this is so regardless of
our particular beliefs.
Today, after years of lies and blind destruction, the only weapon of mass
destruction discovered by American in Iraq is that which America made itself:
civil war.
Arab societies – one can never repeat this enough – have paid the
highest price for terrorism. The human and material damage is considerable. Arab
writers are thus well positioned to talk about the violence which has been
exercised against them. To write in such a climate, to survive such chaos, leads
one to reflect perhaps more quickly upon the rifts, the damages which the
globalization of suffering and brutalizing of the world inflicts.
This real and symbolic violence has pursued me for my entire life, and
today I measure to what degree it was completely present in my subconscious and
in my writings riddled with cracks, squeezed between the unspoken and the terms
of a life lived in precarious balance inside a discourse which proclaims we are
free, whereas we know, the torturer and I, that our truths appear in the most
oppositional of registers
I have escaped torture and death several times, but I have not escaped
their impressions which have left their marks on my memory. While I was beaten
at a very young age, while I had to read my poems with a revolver at my temple,
I have also integrated the fear and the marks which left their canine teeth in
my brain. We are, even as we run half-way across the world pursued by our past,
our agonies, and we continually struggle to pull ourselves up and stand up to
challenges that others do not know, will never know.
Our sole concern is to make our writing part of a permanent denunciation
of the terrors and untruths of the powers whose only concern involves
transforming us into guard dogs.
No one among us escapes the allure of tranquility, the dream of calm and
abundance, but power, all power, that of money and that of weapons, that of the
gods, like that of morality, has no other object than that of reducing us to
their own loyal servants.
The messianism that is appearing everywhere today seeks only to break
down all opposition, to convert it into vain speech, and metamorphose us into
the valets of the contaminated propaganda which provokes journalists to embark
with regiments, forbids all free speech, and mobilizes battalions of
script-writers to proclaim the truths of the most powerful states.
Journalists and writers killed in cold blood, those who are censured
through imprisonment, with only their fellow journalists to act as lawyers, and
occasionally a partially chloroformed opinion, transformed into a receptacle for
lies distilled by public relations agencies in service of the governments which
manufacture truth and morality, the rights of the peoples the doormats upon
which they wipe their bloody boots.
The discourse about democracy and human rights is a modest fig leaf upon
the saber and the sword, is a joke which makes no one laugh more than the men
and women who are subjected to the most infamous of dominations, who are reduced
to begging for their dignity and a day of freedom. The world today is a battle
between state terrorism and terrorism, both of which gorge upon our fragilities.
If there remains a legitimate violence, it is that of reason, because the
violence of the state has been perverted to serve, not the defense of democratic
institutions and innocent citizens, but the interests of financial oligarchies
and the cartel of arms and oil dealers, rendering, through a thousand and one
subterfuges, null and void the protection of citizens who are blackmailed into
giving away their legitimate right to defense from aggression to those who arm
the aggressors and provide them, by their politics or by their active
complicity, with the right to position themselves as the victims.
Although I attempt to separate my work as a journalist from my work as a
novelist because I want to give my books a depth beyond that of the immediate, I
never forget that I remain a witness. And I witness that we have perverted
words, that we have violated our ethical code and endangered the truth.
More examples? Look at how, through collateral damage and surgical
strikes, conducted following the acquisition of targets, concluded by the
stealth penetration of the Tomahawk or the cruise missile, an Iraq that has not
known savage and massive bombardments, but merely strikes, like the bites of
mosquitoes, has reached the securing phase, that is to say, the occupation
phase. It was not a matter of invasion, nor of colonization or trusteeship, but
of a democratically imposed death.
Six hundred journalists accepted, without wondering at its strangeness,
to set off with the regiments of the invading army and only three or four
reported that American soldiers killed unarmed prisoners of war and defenseless
women and children. The journalists identified with the soldiers they
accompanied. And as all roads are open to you in journalism, they plundered
Iraqi works of art and took war trophies, their souls at peace and smiles upon
their lips, and some among them also took a shot when the opportunity was
offered them. So where are these ethics in which one revels for the duration of a column? And I do not mean speaking of targeted assassinations and using linguistic novelties in order to misrepresent reality and coat it in the sweetness of lies. This new lexicon of violence merits more than our silence; this new violence merits our own violence, that of being rejected and denounced as the plague of words. Why did I begin with telling you about my city, that Oran which Albert Camus made the setting for his novel, The Plague? Is it because I have the feeling that the plague has returned, or is it just that my memory is playing me a lousy trick? T:I:S,
6. Februar 2007 * In a recent interview, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted that if free elections were organized today in the Arab world, it would be fundamentalist governments that would come to power, without a shot being fired, because of current governments’ corruption and incapacity to manage their societies. The fundamentalists propose, as always, false solution to real problems. [1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. from French by Constance Farrington, p. 38, New York 1961 [2] Frantz Fanon, op. cit. p. 34 Hamid Skif: Memoire et Violence. Mai 2006 Hamid Skif: Memory and Violence. Translated by Cullen Goldblatt. Ins Netz gestellt mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors. Hamid Skif: Erinnerung und Gewalt. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Stefan Linster. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik. Bonn, Berlin (Blätter Verlagsgesellschaft) Heft 8/2006. Alle drei Fassungen in: Schreiben in friedloser Welt. Essays und Diskussionen. 72. Internationalen PEN-Kongress. Berlin (PEN-Zentrum Deutschland) 22. - 28. Mai 2006 / Der Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien. Die Publikation kann gegen eine Spende telefonisch 06151-23120, per Fax 06151-293414 oder per E-Mail bestellt werden. (Spendenkonto für Writers in Prison: Nr. 130 808 901, Commerzbank Darmstadt, BLZ 508 400 05, IBAN: DE05 5084 0005 0130 8089 01 BIC: COBADEFFXXX) *Steinberg Recherche Referent Texte 2007 Texte 2006 Texte 2005 Texte 2004 Texte bis 2003 Karten Bilder Suchen Home nach oben
URL dieser Seite: http://www.steinbergrecherche.com/hamidskif.htm |
