Preamble
Three years ago, I read Edward Said for the first time. It was for a postcolonial literature course, a genre that never really appealed to me. The stories were always about sad, upper-middle class comprador families, literature written by the colonised in the language of the coloniser about colonising. Sometimes it’s India, sometimes it’s Indonesia or Malaya or Chile or Brazil, but the main character always grows up in the same sweltering heat, gets mocked by comprador children but is always intelligent and literate in the coloniser’s tongue (totally not a self-insert). Then they become the servant of the comprador or bwana class and a riot breaking out before an ambiguous ending.
Postcol fiction sucks. But postcolonial theory is real and raw – is what Said taught me. Where fiction stumbles on its awkward metaphors and framing devices, Fanon and Said hit the hammer right on the nail and drive their knives deep into the metaphorical point. And it makes sense. Because postcolonialism as a movement/time period in history was so violent, so filled with evil that its cruelty could never be justified. No fictional depiction of India or Mexico could do the real thing justice.
The assigned reading by Said was Orientalism. It was a bread and butter text, but totally unknown to me as a fresh-faced undergrad.
“indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”
That was the first time a theory text actually blew my mind. Orientalism was written in 1978 and this shit is still true today. The media systematically pushes ideas of “European superiority over Oriental backwardness”. In the past, it was those racist caricatures of yellow Japs and Chinks and lazy Blacks. Today, it’s evolved to an algorithmic crescendo as TikTok pushes ragebait content to the top of everyone’s queue. India’s putting their feet in street food, China’s ships are crumpling in the sea, Ghana just invented a new car (It’s actually a cardboard box)!
Said’s Orient/West framework was illuminating as well. It’s just like de Beauvoir’s famous gender binary: Just as Man relies on Woman as Other, the West defines itself against the Orient. It’s almost a dialectical position, except that I don’t see any synthesis between Orient and West.
Anyway, that’s enough preamble about Said. My point is, postcol fiction sucks. The theory is fun to read, punchy and poignant. That’s because postcolonialism is a lived reality for billions. And the shit was so bad that words fail as a medium of depiction. Postcolonialism is still going on. Most of Africa is being economically exploited by Europe, the Global South languishes in poverty and IMF debts and Palestine is still being occupied, its people genocided. Which brings us to the main topic, my quick summary of Said’s arguments from The Question of Palestine.
The Question of Palestine
This book is special because it presents the arguments, a “Palestinian position, something not very well known and certainly not well appreciated”. In other words, the subaltern is speaking. One of Said’s main arguments in this book is that the Palestinians should have a voice regarding their land. This is further complicated by:
-Racist depictions and scapegoating of the Palestinians -Zionist efforts to erase evidence of Palestinian existence -Zionist efforts to erase evidence of Palestinian history
Said spends almost half the book giving evidence of this and arguing against Zionism as a racist and exclusionary ideology. Because Zionism is “discussed as if it concerned Jews only, whereas it has been the Palestinian who has borne the brunt of Zionism’s extraordinary human cost” (52). I’d argue that it’s because the Zionists have always framed the Palestinians as something other than “real”. Said brings up the example of Alphonse de Lamartine, a French colonist. On his 1833 visit to the Holy Land, he recommended that the land be colonised by France and that its territory was “not really a country” (9). Said argues that Lamartine is deliberately canceling out the reality of the natives living on that land because of his wish that “the land be empty for development by a more deserving power”.
We’ve seen this time and again in the coloniser’s playbook. In America, the colonists called in manifest destiny. In Australia, they called it terra nullius: land belonging to no one. To politically justify the illegal seizure, settling and genocide of indigenous peoples the following playbook is used:
1. Diminish them as backwards, uncivilised, dirty subhumans requiring “enlightenment” 2. Erase evidence of their realities and past existence 3. Clear them from the land for settling 4. Repeat step 1 and 2 to present day
Australia and the USA’s political legitimacy completely lies on this concept. If they condemn Israel, they are condemning themselves. Both are states founded by genocide, slavery and illegally settling indigenous land. They have justified their actions with ideologies such as white supremacy. To the American settler, Filipino and African were the same, they were both uncivilised n*gger. Therefore they had to be disposed of, their land taken, and if a few hundred thousands of them had to die, that was fine, it’s not that bad anyway because they’re subhumans. In all three states, the indigenous people were nothing more than a bunch of pests that had to be disposed of or “otherwise rendered inconsequential” (242).
Two quotes from page 80 of Said’s book:
Lord Kitchcner on the Survey o f Galilee: We hope to rescue from the hands of that ruthless destroyer, the uneducated Arab, one of the most interesting ruins in Palestine, hallowed by footprints of our Lord, I allude to the synagogue of Capernaum, which is rapidly disappearing owing to the stones being burnt for lime. O ne C . R. C onder in his “ Present Condition o f Palestine": The native peasantry are well worth a few words of descrip tion, They arc brutally ignorant, fanatical, and above all, inveterate liars; yet they have qualities *which would, if developed, render them a useful population. (He cites their cleverness, energy, and endurance for pain, heat, etc.]
This is essentially Said’s argument in the book. That Palestinians, as indigenous people, deserve a voice and decision regarding their own land. The 1978 Camp David Accords denied Palestinian representation. Neither did the Balfour Declaration (1917) when the territories were drawn, nor the UN Partition Plan (1947) where Palestinian land was given to European Jews, the Oslo Accords (1993) nor the US Peace Plan (2020). After reading the book, it seems so absurd. And I wanted to write a longer summary with more of my thoughts, but this is too depressing.
Yet although the Palestinians have not gained a stronger political voice in the international playing field, Said’s dream may have came true. Palestinians today have access to smartphones and have recorded their daily lives under occupation, broadcasting to the world. It’s no wonder the conflict has been called “a livestreamed genocide”. Palestinian political power is the strongest that it’s ever been. The subaltern has spoken. Millions of supporters from the Orient and the Occident, the Global South and the Global North chant “Free, free Palestine”, “自由巴勒斯坦”, “இலவச பாலஸ்தீனம்". Erasing the Palestinian people’s lived existence has become impossible. And hence I believe that they will be free.
Palestina libre
"To speak of the Palestinians rationally is, I think, to stop speaking about war or genocide and to start to deal seriously with political reality. There is a Palestinian people, there is an Israeli occupation o f Palestinian lands, there are Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, there are Palestinians— 650,000 of them— who are Israeli citizens and who constitute 15 percent of the population of Israel, there is a large Palestinian population in exile: these are actualities which the United States and most of the world have directly or indirectly acknowledged, which Israel too has acknowledged, if only in the forms of denial, rejection, threats of war, and- punishment."