Post by Admin on Aug 2, 2020 18:52:09 GMT
John Berger and Everyday Acts of Sumūd
John Berger documented the creativity and resilience of Palestinian communities over several years, considering it a ‘paradigm’ of how communities everywhere struggle for justice in their daily lives. Juman Simaan explores how a culture resists the forces of colonialism and the role writers and witnesses play. 'I hoped that my presence among the farmers as they harvested olives and planted trees, and telling their stories, was an act of solidarity and resistance'.
dark-mountain.net/john-berger-and-everyday-acts-of-sumud/
The work of sumud, from childbearing and building to testifying and fighting, continues 1
– Edward Said After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives
A man asks us for a lift to his village near Aʾl khalīl. Salim is returning home early from a working day in construction on the other side of the separation barrier, which – not having a permit – he crosses every day out of sight of the soldiers.
Salim has a beehive in the village and made one ton of honey last year. He tells me proudly that his bees fly across the barrier to Israel to suck the nectar from the blossom there – as he sees it, an act of resistance by the bees in defiance of the barrier that doesn’t allow the humans of the West Bank to cross without a permit. Salim asks what I do here, and tells me about a family he knows whose land ‘has been eaten away by the barrier’; they are now separated from their olive trees and unable to access their land.
After we drop Salim off, my thoughts keep turning back to the bees, returning with their nectar from across the barrier, from flowers planted by the occupiers, enjoying a freedom not possible for their human keepers, to make the honey of resistance to benefit the occupied. I regret not exchanging numbers with Salim so we can later take up his invitation to visit his house, meet his family and taste his honey, but we are in a hurry to reach home before the weather worsens. I think of the other communities in Palestine whose everyday lives deserve to be highlighted, such as wage labourers and Bedouins. I wonder perhaps if in the future I or others can tell the stories of these groups’ forms of daily resistance, which I am seeing everywhere – even in the way of life of Salem’s bees and the honey they make.
A paradigm of daily resistance
This entry in my journal described a late winter day in 2015 in the southern hills of Palestine, where I was staying to help plant olive trees and meet olive growers for doctoral research I was conducting. My ancestors had tended their olive groves in the northern hills before the country was colonised and divided, after which they became landless labourers. I wished to return to my home country to learn from those who preserved their traditions of working the land. I wanted to explore the effects of Israel’s military occupation on farmers’ daily life, and how they were responding to the colonisation of their lands, the segregation of their communities and the restrictions on their daily activities.
The story that emerged is of a community’s survival and resistance, and of their striving for a more just future. Acts of daily resistance were everywhere both in the olive groves, and in the works of John Berger I had been immersing myself in. John Berger was an anti-capitalist art critic, author and activist who championed the causes of marginalised communities, among them peasants’ and migrant workers’ in Europe. Berger was one of the most prominent witnesses and friends of the Palestinians. He died in 2017 and left us with letters, essays, novels, poems and sketches infused with references to this unique daily resistance as a mode of existence and practice. One of Berger’s first encounters with Palestinian culture of resistance was with children’s drawings of their realities during the Iʾntifāda (uprising) of the late 1980s. Faithful Witnesses is a beautiful creation by the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata who, influenced by Berger’s Ways of Seeing, compiled a collection of children’s drawings of their forbearers’ lands, everyday life under military occupation and their dreams and visions of peace and justice they had never lived through.
Berger wrote in the book’s preface:
The territory these children paint has its own spatial laws[…]Their space has always been stolen, and the theft has always been covered by raised guns. Look at their pictures. The children taught themselves how to resist. They invented their secret. Their secret was to imitate the air, which nothing can confine and through which everything is visible.
Such ways of seeing are ever-present in Palestinian art. Ghassan Kanfani, a Palestinian writer and activist, coined the phrase ‘literature of resistance’ (muqāwama) referring to writing as means to confront Israeli oppression of Palestinian communities. Kanfani’s piece ‘Letter from Gaza’ was an inspiration for Berger’s 2008 novel A to X. For Berger, Palestine represented the international struggle for justice against the forces of globalised capitalism and imperialism. Visiting for the first time in 2003 he began to consider Palestine a ‘paradigm’ of how communities everywhere struggle for justice in their daily lives. For Edward Said, a Palestinian American thinker, Palestine ‘provides the test-case for a true universalism’ and the fight for human dignity and freedom. That paradigm is nowhere clearer in Berger’s work than in his essay ‘Meanwhile’ 2 , in which he considered all of us – in varying degrees – as captives living under the rule of globalised financial capitalism. Berger urged us to learn from the ways in which our fellow prisoners, incarcerated in real-life prisons, seek small spaces in which they can enact their solidarity with each other and express their freedom and self-determination; and find ways to communicate with the outside world
John Berger documented the creativity and resilience of Palestinian communities over several years, considering it a ‘paradigm’ of how communities everywhere struggle for justice in their daily lives. Juman Simaan explores how a culture resists the forces of colonialism and the role writers and witnesses play. 'I hoped that my presence among the farmers as they harvested olives and planted trees, and telling their stories, was an act of solidarity and resistance'.
dark-mountain.net/john-berger-and-everyday-acts-of-sumud/
The work of sumud, from childbearing and building to testifying and fighting, continues 1
– Edward Said After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives
A man asks us for a lift to his village near Aʾl khalīl. Salim is returning home early from a working day in construction on the other side of the separation barrier, which – not having a permit – he crosses every day out of sight of the soldiers.
Salim has a beehive in the village and made one ton of honey last year. He tells me proudly that his bees fly across the barrier to Israel to suck the nectar from the blossom there – as he sees it, an act of resistance by the bees in defiance of the barrier that doesn’t allow the humans of the West Bank to cross without a permit. Salim asks what I do here, and tells me about a family he knows whose land ‘has been eaten away by the barrier’; they are now separated from their olive trees and unable to access their land.
After we drop Salim off, my thoughts keep turning back to the bees, returning with their nectar from across the barrier, from flowers planted by the occupiers, enjoying a freedom not possible for their human keepers, to make the honey of resistance to benefit the occupied. I regret not exchanging numbers with Salim so we can later take up his invitation to visit his house, meet his family and taste his honey, but we are in a hurry to reach home before the weather worsens. I think of the other communities in Palestine whose everyday lives deserve to be highlighted, such as wage labourers and Bedouins. I wonder perhaps if in the future I or others can tell the stories of these groups’ forms of daily resistance, which I am seeing everywhere – even in the way of life of Salem’s bees and the honey they make.
A paradigm of daily resistance
This entry in my journal described a late winter day in 2015 in the southern hills of Palestine, where I was staying to help plant olive trees and meet olive growers for doctoral research I was conducting. My ancestors had tended their olive groves in the northern hills before the country was colonised and divided, after which they became landless labourers. I wished to return to my home country to learn from those who preserved their traditions of working the land. I wanted to explore the effects of Israel’s military occupation on farmers’ daily life, and how they were responding to the colonisation of their lands, the segregation of their communities and the restrictions on their daily activities.
The story that emerged is of a community’s survival and resistance, and of their striving for a more just future. Acts of daily resistance were everywhere both in the olive groves, and in the works of John Berger I had been immersing myself in. John Berger was an anti-capitalist art critic, author and activist who championed the causes of marginalised communities, among them peasants’ and migrant workers’ in Europe. Berger was one of the most prominent witnesses and friends of the Palestinians. He died in 2017 and left us with letters, essays, novels, poems and sketches infused with references to this unique daily resistance as a mode of existence and practice. One of Berger’s first encounters with Palestinian culture of resistance was with children’s drawings of their realities during the Iʾntifāda (uprising) of the late 1980s. Faithful Witnesses is a beautiful creation by the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata who, influenced by Berger’s Ways of Seeing, compiled a collection of children’s drawings of their forbearers’ lands, everyday life under military occupation and their dreams and visions of peace and justice they had never lived through.
Berger wrote in the book’s preface:
The territory these children paint has its own spatial laws[…]Their space has always been stolen, and the theft has always been covered by raised guns. Look at their pictures. The children taught themselves how to resist. They invented their secret. Their secret was to imitate the air, which nothing can confine and through which everything is visible.
Such ways of seeing are ever-present in Palestinian art. Ghassan Kanfani, a Palestinian writer and activist, coined the phrase ‘literature of resistance’ (muqāwama) referring to writing as means to confront Israeli oppression of Palestinian communities. Kanfani’s piece ‘Letter from Gaza’ was an inspiration for Berger’s 2008 novel A to X. For Berger, Palestine represented the international struggle for justice against the forces of globalised capitalism and imperialism. Visiting for the first time in 2003 he began to consider Palestine a ‘paradigm’ of how communities everywhere struggle for justice in their daily lives. For Edward Said, a Palestinian American thinker, Palestine ‘provides the test-case for a true universalism’ and the fight for human dignity and freedom. That paradigm is nowhere clearer in Berger’s work than in his essay ‘Meanwhile’ 2 , in which he considered all of us – in varying degrees – as captives living under the rule of globalised financial capitalism. Berger urged us to learn from the ways in which our fellow prisoners, incarcerated in real-life prisons, seek small spaces in which they can enact their solidarity with each other and express their freedom and self-determination; and find ways to communicate with the outside world