To Be in the World: Notes Against Forgetting

‘Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.’

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.

In March 2002, a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers visited the Gaza Strip, among other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The delegation, invited by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and under the aegis of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, included writers such as Portugal’s José Saramago, the American writer, Russell Banks, Italy’s Vicenzo Conselo, and the Nigerian writer and playwright, Wole Soyinka.

Deeply troubled by the experience, in particular the worsening plight of Palestinians since the Nakba (Arabic word for catastrophe) of 1948 in which thousands of Palestinians were forcefully exiled from their lands by Zionist militia (making way for the creation of the State of Israel), Soyinka would reflect on the visit in a 2002 essay titled ‘The Isle of Polyphemus’. In the essay, Soyinka likened the ‘blind fury’ with which the state of Israel maintained its military occupation to that of Polyphemus, the giant cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. He wrote:

What my brief stay among ordinary Palestinians did was simply to compel me to revisit that and allied policy statements by the Israeli government, promoted with such galling insensitivity by the US government. If I took anything away from our visit personally, it was the intensification of my private terror that so much critical interventionism in world affairs actually rests in the hands of such leaders with limitless military power.

What I obtained during my visit was a reinforcement of what had been a source of marvel, and it made me truly afraid for the Israelis–that many of those who believed that their political leader was treading the right path had simply never taken the trouble to project their minds into the refugee camps of the Palestinians, into their daily existence, even if they could not visit the physical reality, experience at first hand the daily humiliation and the scars of memory that fully spell out the condition of nearly all Palestinians today.

We saw the checkpoints through which thousands of Palestinian Arabs pass daily in order to work within their sole economic source–Israel. We were trapped in the endless motor convoys through which Palestinians pass twice a day. Those convoys reminded me of my own country, Nigeria, between the first military coup and the Biafran Civil War, and its immediate aftermath. It recalled the faces of despair and resignation, but also the simmering anger of a populace that faced daily humiliation at the hands of an arrogant military.

A few years later, in 2008, another eminent Nigerian literary figure, Chinua Achebe, would publicly declare support for Palestine as one of the founding patrons of the Palestine Festival of Literature. In his inaugural address, Achebe expressed hope that the festival would help ‘switch off even for a moment the noise of violence and death’ and that the event would ‘grow and resound with peace in Gaza, the West Bank, Palestine, the Middle East, and around the world.’

Having lived through the Nigerian-Biafran War, Achebe was well acquainted with the noise of violence and death, with the struggle of a beleaguered minority group resisting a much stronger, more widely supported opponent intent on utter victory. Closing the address, he recited a poem composed during the war titled ‘Refugee Mother and Child.’ Like Soyinka, Achebe saw stark parallels between the unchecked state violence wrought upon Palestine and the brutality waged by the Nigerian state against Biafrans and other citizens in successive governments.

Speaking from Biafra in 1969 on his disappointment with independence and the international response to the Biafran cause, Achebe noted the doublespeak of the British government, which kept up a facade of neutrality while supplying the Nigerian military with warships to impose a blockade. The blockade cut off food supplies to Biafra, leading to severe famine and the starvation of millions. The methods of Israel’s ‘complete siege’ on Gaza, in which Israel has bombed Gaza from land, air and sea, and cut off power, food and water, would have been instantly familiar to Achebe. In an interview with Transition Magazine published in its 1968 issue, the Nigerian-Biafran war now in its second year, Achebe described the conditions of Biafrans in grim detail:

From morning about 7 a.m. to about 6 p.m. there is this tenseness. At any moment they might come. It does not take long-a few seconds-and 120 people are charred to ashes, charred black, and perhaps 20 buildings wrecked, and this is a very real thing[…]Food is short, drugs are short. Thousands-no, millions by now-have been uprooted from their homes and brought into the safer areas where they really have no roots, no property, many of them live in school buildings, camps, and the committee does what it can.

Reports from Palestine, not just over the past weeks, but over seven decades under Israeli rule, testify to intensified devastations of a similar nature. In n+1 Magazine, Saree Makdisi, a literary critic of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, wrote recently:

At any moment, without warning, at any time of the day or night, any apartment building in the densely populated Gaza Strip can be struck by an Israeli bomb or missile. Some of the stricken buildings simply collapse into layers of concrete pancakes, the dead and the living alike entombed in the shattered ruins. Often, rescuers shouting ‘hadan sami’ana?’ (‘can anyone hear us?’) hear calls for help from survivors deep in the rubble, but without heavy lifting equipment all they can do is helplessly scrabble at the concrete slabs with crowbars or their bare hands, hoping against hope to pry open gaps wide enough to get survivors or the injured out. Some buildings are struck with such heavy bombs that the ensuing fireballs shower body parts and sometimes whole charred bodies—usually, because of their small size, those of children—over surrounding neighborhoods.

What is laid bare in the similarity of these two excerpts is what Zoé Samudzi, a scholar of genocide, calls ‘The colonial imaginary of total war’ which mobilizes systemic, persistent, and large-scale violence against members of a group on the premise that they are ‘burdens, blemishes, demographic anxieties, existential threats.’ It is, in essence, a geopolitics of extinction.

I draw attention to these parallels now because they emphasize key points for developing a political imagination ‘from below’ in the 21st century and, therefore, might help us, as Africans, respond meaningfully to current events in Palestine and elsewhere. One key point is the necessity of recognizing the distribution of power as a structural phenomenon that is always being negotiated; secondly, the importance of acknowledging specific manifestations of this distribution within local contexts while also acknowledging that systems of oppression are often, if not always, dependent on other systems of oppression. Ideologically and materially linked.

Soyinka’s critiques of the Israeli government in the aforementioned essay implicated, as others have, the United States government, whose diplomatic, financial, and military support of Israel empowers and helps legitimize its occupation. Similarly, Achebe saw how Britain maintained its hold on its former colony by supporting the Nigerian government’s campaign against Biafra. While Britain’s initial response to the Nigerian-Biafran war appeared noncommittal, Egypt’s closure of the Suez Canal during the Six-Day War, only a few days after the Biafran Declaration of Independence, forced a shift. The Canal had been critical to British oil supplies. In its absence, maintaining access to Nigeria’s oil fields became a top priority. When the Federal army gained control of Shell-BP’s oil installations in areas such as Bonny Island, strong support for the Nigerian side, the extent of which Britain wished to keep hidden, became politically and economically expedient.

Elaborating on his disappointments in the response to Biafra, Achebe said, ‘This independence about which we rejoiced in the early 1960s is really quite empty. And if only Africans would see it—see that what’s happening here—that the bell that’s tolling here is tolling for them.’ These collisions and entrapments between and among nation-states—the intensification and transference of penal statecraft and extractive architectures—are a feature of the global order or what is known as modernity. Scholars of modernity and decolonization understand this order to work as a ‘colonial matrix’ or through a ‘coloniality of power’.

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