Tonight I experienced a few firsts at the Palestine Literature Festival's closing night.
- I heard a Nobel laureate read his own writing, part of a short story about threshing floors in South Africa. The writer was JM Coetzee and the venue was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center Garden, which was so full people were sitting on banisters, stone walls, and (like me) the ground under the green lighted fig tree. I found the story fascinating for the way it revealed the mystery of language for a young person trying to make sense of the world. I'll write about that separately.
- I heard a first-hand account of what it was like for one black American woman to travel the route of the slave trade through Ghana. The poet was Saidiya Hartman, and I never wanted her to stop speaking, even though her message was thoroughly discomforting.
- I heard spoken word Palestinina Poetry live for the first time! I've only ever seen videos like this one of this locally revered form of non-violent resistance, and tonight a Palestinian American poet from Brooklyn, Ali Abuajamieh, delivered three of his poems on the stage.
- I felt the tiny hands of a Palestinian baby pressed onto my leg. What looked to me like a 10 or 11 month old, with a choo-choo- in his mouth, was on his mother's in the parched grass next to me. Occasionally he would fall onto me, pushing his tiny might onto my thigh or grasping my sweater sleeve in an attempt to steady himself, or to get my attention, I don't know.
You can tell from the bullet points above that this lit fest was truly international in nature. Coetzee grew up in South Africa during Apartheid, and Hartman has Ghanaian roots but lives in New York now. Abuajamieh's parents are from Jaffa and Haifa (towns now inside the state of Israel, to which Palestinians without specific i.d. can't go).
Last week on their final, the 11th graders were asked what makes interpreting a play different from interpreting a poem. Many of them asked for clarification during the exam, and I had several mini conversations with students asking where they encounter plays, and what is involved in their experience of a play. The performance aspect, the fast pace, not controlled by the reader, the expressions and intonations of the actor, the choices of the director. All these elements came up in these brief exchanges.
Tonight the readings combined these two genres, poetry and theatre, as the tone and expression of the reader, and his or her pace, influenced my understanding. There is something special about hearing literature read, since it is so ephemeral. A beautiful sentence, once heard, hangs in my mind like smoke after a flame is blown out - it bespeaks the beauty of what was there just a second ago, and this remnant will inevitably dissipate within the next few seconds; I probably wouldn't be able to repeat the beautiful sentence if I wanted to. I can't go back to it, I can only smile in the warm ambient glow it's left in my mind.
This happened several times with Hartman's readings, which come from her book Lose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. She described going to Ghana and feeling so thoroughly a foreigner. Her accounts of being identified and referred to as "outsider" (I forget the Ghanaian word) made me think of what it feels like to stick out so markedly on the street here, and how much my sister Tess stuck out when serving in Peace Corps Cameroon.
What made Hartman's message poignant though, was that she had left the US looking for her true "home", and arrived in Ghana only to be made to feel thoroughly foreign, though in a different way than she is in the US.
She described the horrific experience of walking through the "dungeons", the holding cells for slaves, where the ground is literally composed of the compacted remains of humans. She spoke of the euphemism of the phrase slave trade, which implies mutual benefit, and mutual consent. I had never thought about that specific word and how positive its connotation is in our pro-market society, and how inappropriate it is to describe the coercion of slavery.
She also talked about litter in a fascinating way. She said, garbage is the point of conjunction between the living and the dead. It is the remnant of what has been life, and what is now dead. It struck me as an astute observation; "trash" epitomises both the presence of life and the triumph of death.
There are certain images she saw during her pilgrimage that she "rejected". She rejected the reality of walking on the remains of those who had suffered generations before. I wonder if we can actually reject a reality with which we are faced. I'm not talking about a question of self-delusion, which can be the result of cultural narrative ingrained in us since a young age. I mean, when we encounter a situation that disturbs us, can we block it out?
It surely depends on the person, just as whether we are affected by a horror movie depends on our constitution. Have I ever decided to reject something? I'll have to think about that. Have you?
- I heard a Nobel laureate read his own writing, part of a short story about threshing floors in South Africa. The writer was JM Coetzee and the venue was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center Garden, which was so full people were sitting on banisters, stone walls, and (like me) the ground under the green lighted fig tree. I found the story fascinating for the way it revealed the mystery of language for a young person trying to make sense of the world. I'll write about that separately.
- I heard a first-hand account of what it was like for one black American woman to travel the route of the slave trade through Ghana. The poet was Saidiya Hartman, and I never wanted her to stop speaking, even though her message was thoroughly discomforting.
- I heard spoken word Palestinina Poetry live for the first time! I've only ever seen videos like this one of this locally revered form of non-violent resistance, and tonight a Palestinian American poet from Brooklyn, Ali Abuajamieh, delivered three of his poems on the stage.
- I felt the tiny hands of a Palestinian baby pressed onto my leg. What looked to me like a 10 or 11 month old, with a choo-choo- in his mouth, was on his mother's in the parched grass next to me. Occasionally he would fall onto me, pushing his tiny might onto my thigh or grasping my sweater sleeve in an attempt to steady himself, or to get my attention, I don't know.
 |
| Some of the crowd at the KSCC tonight, under the green lighted fig tree. |
You can tell from the bullet points above that this lit fest was truly international in nature. Coetzee grew up in South Africa during Apartheid, and Hartman has Ghanaian roots but lives in New York now. Abuajamieh's parents are from Jaffa and Haifa (towns now inside the state of Israel, to which Palestinians without specific i.d. can't go).
Last week on their final, the 11th graders were asked what makes interpreting a play different from interpreting a poem. Many of them asked for clarification during the exam, and I had several mini conversations with students asking where they encounter plays, and what is involved in their experience of a play. The performance aspect, the fast pace, not controlled by the reader, the expressions and intonations of the actor, the choices of the director. All these elements came up in these brief exchanges.
Tonight the readings combined these two genres, poetry and theatre, as the tone and expression of the reader, and his or her pace, influenced my understanding. There is something special about hearing literature read, since it is so ephemeral. A beautiful sentence, once heard, hangs in my mind like smoke after a flame is blown out - it bespeaks the beauty of what was there just a second ago, and this remnant will inevitably dissipate within the next few seconds; I probably wouldn't be able to repeat the beautiful sentence if I wanted to. I can't go back to it, I can only smile in the warm ambient glow it's left in my mind.
 |
| A crummy photo of Abuajamieh, a spoken word poet |
What made Hartman's message poignant though, was that she had left the US looking for her true "home", and arrived in Ghana only to be made to feel thoroughly foreign, though in a different way than she is in the US.
She described the horrific experience of walking through the "dungeons", the holding cells for slaves, where the ground is literally composed of the compacted remains of humans. She spoke of the euphemism of the phrase slave trade, which implies mutual benefit, and mutual consent. I had never thought about that specific word and how positive its connotation is in our pro-market society, and how inappropriate it is to describe the coercion of slavery.
She also talked about litter in a fascinating way. She said, garbage is the point of conjunction between the living and the dead. It is the remnant of what has been life, and what is now dead. It struck me as an astute observation; "trash" epitomises both the presence of life and the triumph of death.
There are certain images she saw during her pilgrimage that she "rejected". She rejected the reality of walking on the remains of those who had suffered generations before. I wonder if we can actually reject a reality with which we are faced. I'm not talking about a question of self-delusion, which can be the result of cultural narrative ingrained in us since a young age. I mean, when we encounter a situation that disturbs us, can we block it out?
It surely depends on the person, just as whether we are affected by a horror movie depends on our constitution. Have I ever decided to reject something? I'll have to think about that. Have you?
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