About three weeks ago I had a
dream in which I was stumbling through some dark and shattered buildings, demolished
by war, I surmised. I happened to look through an open doorway and saw, abandoned
amidst the wreckage with its legs reflected in a skim of dirty water, a grand
piano. It was so poignant, I thought (still in the dream), “That would make an
amazing black-and-white photograph,” and made to go and fetch my camera. At
some point, and at some other level of consciousness, I realised I could paint
it. Here is the painting.
While in one way this is a
made-up image, a fiction independent of any conscious source, it is also a
faithful reproduction of what my dream-imagination presented to me. So I feel
there’s a kind of documentary fidelity to it – a truth-in-the-fiction. Now, I
did not then (in the dream) explicitly connect the image with the current Gaza
war. All wars smash up the beauties of
culture. (This is unlike an earlier painting, also reproduced with exactitude
from a dream-presentation, which is obviously derived from the newsreel images
saturating the TV channels. See it at the end of this essay; what the green
panels symbolise remains mysterious, but there they were in the dream.) But it evokes
a little frisson of congruence, as I read the other day an article by Moustafa
Bayoumi in the Guardian about his one-time teacher, the
Palestinian-American scholar-activist Edward Said. As well as being a fine and
feisty writer, Said was a concert-level pianist.
Edward Said died in the same
year as my father – 2003. By then I had read Said’s best-known book, Orientalism
(1978), one of many works that helped me in the laborious task of undoing the
colonial bigotries of my upbringing. My father was a terrific and beneficial
personality in many respects but, like so many self-manufactured ‘white
Rhodesians’, he was unrepentantly racist. Part of our collective racism
incorporated an unreflective admiration of that parallel beleaguered state,
Israel. As we waged our own anti-insurgency war, we almost gloated over the
military prowess of the still-young Israel over the Arab hordes: I vacuumed up
accounts of the Six-Day War and biographies of Moshe Dayan, the eye-patched
smirking general. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were – much like our
black countrymen – beneath notice, except as faceless barbarians. Our responses
were governed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s lethal hostage-taking
at the 1976 Munich Olympics (an event with some chilling parallels to Hamas’
attack last October 7). Yasir Arafat was the devil incarnate, and when, after
Independence, a Palestinian ambassador was invited to Zimbabwe, the whites,
still reeling from their overthrow, vilified him.
How things have changed – and
not.
Meanwhile, back at the
hermitage, I’ve been reading lots of other stuff. Some is obviously related,
such as The Story of the Jews by Simon Schama, perhaps a British-Jewish
kind of counterpart to Said. Alongside, I’ve been reading a bunch of Eastern
Cape Frontier Wars works, original accounts as well as later scholarly
histories and fictions. This material seems less related to the Israel-Palestine
morass – and yet …
For example, there is a
positively tedious novel, set in my corner of the Eastern Cape, entitled The
Settler’s Eldest Daughter, by one F Bancroft. This was written to celebrate
the centenary of the arrival of the 1820 settlers, and is accordingly saturated
with the missionary message of Britain bringing civilisation to the benighted
blacks. Indeed, Anne Ashe the heroine is bullied into joining her father at
Salem by the importunings of a dark and mysterious voice from nowhere, which
turns out to be the spirit of an amorphous ‘Africa’, begging her to come and
conquer and rescue the continent from devilish and ignorant heathenism. Still,
behind this self-justificatory tosh and between acres of glutinous dialogue and
heartfelt maunderings about difficult men (it is after all a Romance, with the
Frontier Wars as mere backdrop), one finds more complex and contradictory
sparks. Bits of conversation show that Bancroft, almost despite himself, was
aware there was debate about whether the British ought to be there at all, and
how they should be conducting themselves.
In depicting various characters,
Bancroft recognises that within the imperial enterprise there were “moderates”
and “extremists”, the Jingoist and the Militarist, divisions between class
attitudes, and tensions between Boer and Briton. While there are characters who
see murderous blacks behind every bush, worthless and irredeemable savages who
should be obliterated along with elephants and leopards, others see them as “open
to reason”, capable of being “tamed and transformed by … strict justice”, and
even “noble in their savagery”. In a rare instance, a Xhosa man named Maputa is
permitted his say: “The white man pretends to be honest and friendly; but look!
Since ever they set foot in this land the black man has been pushed bit by bit
further and further out of his place till now he must make his kraals in a
strange place – in the kloofs and fastnesses across the Great [Fish] River.” Hence the mistrust, the mutual cattle-rustling,
the spasms of open warfare in which men give in to the temptations of a “God of
Force” instead of that God of “Peace, Love and Goodwill” who, in Bancroft’s
predetermining presentation, is bound to usher in “the new life of the Earthly
Paradise”. Evidently he thought that by 1920 this had been pretty much achieved
in the Zuueveld/Albany – as conveniently foretold by some of his characters a
century before. In a manner analogous to the Jews, these Bible-wielding Britons
thus see themselves as a people divinely chosen to establish an enlightened (and
controlling) reign in a forbidding land; indeed Bancroft uses the term “our
Zion of Refuge”.
Moreover, the demeaning,
dismissive, self-justifying rhetoric used by the less enlightened, militaristic
settler-soldiers in the novel is strikingly similar to that used by racists elsewhere,
whether it be 1970s Rhodesians, Spanish Muslims vilifying and slaughtering Jews
in the 1100s (as I’ve been reading in Schama), or the current Israeli
government doing much the same to Palestinians in Gaza. But I want to return to
the little pronouncement accorded to “Maputa”, quoted above. This speech
closely resembles a longer one quoted by the poet-settler Thomas Pringle in an
account he wrote of Xhosa prophet-leader,
Makanna or Makhanda. Upon Makhanda’s capture in September 1819, one of his councillors,
unnamed, upbraided Colonel Willshire. It remains intensely moving, despite (as
Pringle noted) his third-hand “bald translation”:
“The war (he said) is an unjust one, for you are determined to extirpate
a people whom you have forced to take up arms. When our fathers, and the
fathers of the boors, first established themselves in the Zuurveld, we then
lived together in peace … until the herds of the Caffers [amaXhosa] increased
so as to make the hearts of the boors sore. What these covetous men could not
get from our fathers for old buttons, they took by force … The boors made
commandos on our fathers. Our fathers drove them out of the Zuurveld, and lived
there, because they had conquered it. There we were circumcised; there we got
wives; and there our children were born. The white men hated us, but could not
drive us away. When there was war, we plundered you. When there was peace, some
of our bad people stole, but our chiefs forbade it. … You sent a commando – you
took our last cow – you left only a few calves – which died for want, along
with our children. … Without milk, - our corn destroyed – we saw our wives and
children perish – we saw that we must ourselves perish; - we followed,
therefore, on the spoor of our cattle into the Colony. We plundered, and we
fought for our lives … for you began the war. We failed – and you are here. We
wish for peace; we wish to rest in our huts; we wish to get milk for our
children; our wives wish to till the land. But your troops cover the plains,
and swarm in the thickets, where they cannot distinguish the man from the
woman, and shoot all …”
Willshire was unmoved, and the
colonial military continued for decades to inflict collective punishment.
Similarly, what Edward Said wrote 35 years ago in An Open
Letter to American-Jewish Intellectuals (1989), uncannily, unnervingly, sounds like it was written yesterday:
I
cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American
intellectuals just because the “security” of Israel demands it, But it is overridden or hidden
no matter how overpoweringly cruel, no matter how inhuman and barbaric, no
matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it is doing. To bomb a hospital; to use
napalm against civilians; to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl, or
bark, or scream ‘Arafat is a whore’s son’; to break the arms and legs of
children; to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space,
sanitation, water or legal charge; to use teargas in schools: All these are
horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against ‘terrorism’ or the
requirements of security. Not to note them, not to remember them, not to say,
‘Wait a moment: Can such acts be necessary for the sake of the Jewish people?’
is inexplicable, but it is also to be complicit in these acts. The self-imposed
silence of intellectuals who possess, in other cases and for other countries,
supremely fine critical faculties is stunning.
How appallingly close is that to
the plea of today’s ordinary Palestinians, who beg on our television screens only
to be accorded an equal humanity, a minimum of peaceable autonomy and freedom
to flourish? And how closely does that, ironically, echo Shakespeare’s famous
fictional-but-true Jew, Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, complaining:
If you prick
us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we
not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (III,i)
*****
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