There were no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
The Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969)
In his Camera Lucida/La Chambre claire (1980), Roland Barthes (1915–1980) made a famous distinction between the two conflating semiotic turfs of studium and punctum in the making of a photographic message.1 While for Barthes studium denotes the cultural (ranging from linguistic to political) component of the photograph, punctum marks the personal (raging from memorial to emotive). Barthes developed this theory in particular reference to a photograph of his own mother, shortly after her death—and thus turned a private act of mourning into the semiotic reflection on the public function of photography. By tragic serendipity, soon after the publication of Camera Lucida, Barthes died in an automobile accident, posthumously turning his reflections on his mother’s death into a premonitory mourning of his own.
Studium Intra Punctum
In Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s photography the studium and punctum collapse into each other, the personal mutates into public, and the individually memorial becomes communally commemorative, a common fate for art associated with the label “Palestinian.” There is a sense of public mourning about Al-Ghoussein’s photography of a wall-enclosed, caged-in Palestine that he cannot (but) claim and call home—a premonitory set of images in which he at once announces the photographic memory of his homeland (making it possible for the whole world to see) and mourns the fact that he can no longer see it. Al-Ghoussein is the photographer of a loss he never possessed, a visual chronicler of a dispossession historically flaunted at him every time he comes near the sign “Israel”: dispossession of Palestinians of their homeland (studium), of Al-Ghoussein of the artist he would have been (punctum) were he not born to (what Golda Meir thought were) non-existent Palestinian parents living in a colonial concoction called “Kuwait.”
What is this obsession with an apartheid wall he has never seen, refugee camp tents in which he has never lived, barbed wires that have never incarcerated him, or barriers that deny him a landscape he can otherwise have, own and watch all he wants? Al-Ghoussein is quite conscious of the transcending objects that crowd his agitated soul and sees them as form, as framing, as pictorial formalism, as a desolate landscape that he populates with his misplaced anxieties, with design and designation—overcompensating for the distances and deformities he has witnessed carved on his existence as a (non-existent) Palestinian. One photograph by Al-Ghoussein reminds me of the wall and door that commemorate the Shatila massacre at the entrance to the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. Memories haunt—and being a Palestinian means that you exist in the vantage point of non-existence, that you see from the site of the invisible, where no one can observe or report you to the Israeli authorities.
Al-Ghoussein’s photographic memories are staged, recalling a Palestine he has never seen or been allowed to call home—and he is thus condemned to roam the barren landscape of a nameless desert (a modern Moses) in search of a simulacrum of signs and signifiers he can collect and call home—in vain, for as a Palestinian (thus decreed the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir) he does not exist. “As I attempt to come to terms with the issues related to my personal experience as a Palestinian-Kuwaiti,” so muses Al-Ghoussein, “[who] has never lived within the borders of Palestine, it has become apparent that this current body of work seeks to transcend the obvious reference to the unethical ‘defense barrier’ being constructed in Palestine.”2 “Unethical,” he says, looking Emmanuel Levinas straight in the face and announcing his alterity for the philosopher of alterity to see. While his forms echo the politically palpable and publicly evident Israeli apartheid wall, Al-Ghoussein explains “the ‘walls’ and ‘mounds’ that appear throughout the images also speak of my own individual struggles irrespective of the conventional notions of national identity.”3 His landscapes are so decidedly immemorial because, as he says, “although I did not set out to investigate the notion of transience, this series developed from a process of exploring ideas related to land and place.”4 The public becomes private for Al-Ghoussein, spectrum dictum, for “while unexpected, the strong emphasis on longing led to a consideration of changing landscapes and ephemeral moments that are fixed in time rather than located in a specific place.”5 As a (non-existent) Palestinian artist, Al-Ghoussein cannot have a claim to any “specific place,” and in that inability he is the Palestinian artist of a loss far more metaphysical than solely political, global than merely national. He is a seer of a future that has wiped out his past, denied him his Heideggerian Dasein, metaphorized his being-in-the-world: Existing from the site of the non-existence; seeing from the sight of invisibility.
How can an artist who does not exist contribute to the making of an art that transcends his national trauma and becomes a universal landscape of desolate solitude? What is Al-Ghoussein doing—you may wonder—roaming so decidedly alone through these undecidedly vacated landscapes! Where is he coming from, where is he going to—this lonesome figure traversing the barren deserts of his own agitated imagination? No olive grove, no shady site of orange trees—he is no Michel Khleifi reminiscing about the Nazareth of his youth in Wedding in Galilee/’Urs fi al-Jalil (1987). He is more of a Mona Hatoum determined to mark and make her soaring solitude global, underlined with the confident gaze of an Elia Suleiman who knows what he does not want, a familiar reflection of Mai Masri looking in desperation in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon for the extended shadow of the home she has lost in Nablus. As American Zionists (children of the Irgun terrorists) were busy positioning themselves in both political parties to make sure nothing happens in the United States under their Israeli radar, Palestinian artists have been busy documenting the contours of a human eternity in the manner that they see the world. An eternity and a day from now no one will remember who Rahm Israel Emanuel was, but people will look up and behold Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s work. This is not a promise or a premonition. This is a document for posterity.
One thing is clear: Al-Ghoussein is very busy dismantling a wall, the Wall, one which he knows by affinity, if not by experience. He is tearing that wall down from the safe (safe?) distance of an acronym (UAE) in which he lives, rearranges its landscape, teaches, and takes pictures of his agitated dreams. “You are the one who wants to bring down this wall?”, a prison guard is reported to have asked Lenin with incredulity when the petite leader exited a tsarist jail, pointing to the tall walls of the Russian prison where he had been held (1895–1896). “Yes,” he purportedly answered, “This wall is so rotten from within that even I can bring it down.” Al-Ghoussein, judging by his self-portraits, is no petite Lenin. He is a tall Palestinian. And he is bringing down the Wall—the apartheid wall that the Israelis have constructed around themselves to guard against the explosive intrusions of reality.
“Can we project my La Ultima Luna/The Last Moon (2004) on the Wall?”, wondered Miguel Littin in February 2004, when Annemarie Jacir and I invited the prominent Chilean/Palestinian filmmaker to Palestine as part of a Palestinian film festival we had organized. Why not, we thought, we will use the surface of the wall constructed to conceal and hide the horrors of an apartheid regime to show films and reveal the depth of that very same obscenity. Too dangerous, we were told by a Palestinian producer to whom we put the proposition. You cannot get close to the wall with a gathered audience at a time dark enough to actually see anything projected onto the Wall.
Far from the maddening crowd, Tarek Al-Ghoussein is getting up close and quite personal with the Wall, as close as he damn pleases, and far from the sight of Israeli sharpshooters (remember Muhammad al-Durra?), he brings it down—breaking it to pieces, smashing it to powder, placing it on cargo trains, shipping it through his hidden lenses inside his casuistic cameras, dispatching it to nullity. Those Palestinians confined by the power and might of those (real) walls have no such wherewithal, to do any such things to those (real) walls that run right through their homes and homeland, farms and families, water reservoirs and desperations, olive trees and hopes, wedding ceremonies and senses of dignity. They must live behind those walls. By force. Al-Ghoussein does not. So he does as he damn pleases with those walls. How can you aim and shoot at a Palestinian (artist) who does not exist? Like the hero of Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974), Al-Ghoussein sees things and shows them from the safe distance of an outer space where the Shin Bet can hear but cannot reach. They Have No Existence/Laysa Lahum Wujud (1974), as the pioneering Palestinian filmmaker Mustafa Abu-Ali showed in his documentary—documenting a non-existence in defiance.
Here he is, Tarek Al-Ghoussein—standing tall and towering, shipping the dismantled Wall to nowhere on a plane that fears him a terrorist, or worse, an Arab. “I don’t trust Obama,” a woman recently (October 2008) said to Senator McCain, “I have read about him. He’s an Arab.”6 “No, ma’am,” Senator McCain said several times in response. “He’s a decent, family man”, he continued, “a citizen,” he said, “that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”7 No Arab can be decent in America, they both concurred, the anonymous Republican woman and the presidential contender, as did (in tacit or active silence) millions on both sides of American politics—liberal and conservative, neoliberal and neoconservative, Republican and Democrat, Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Pagans. Can an Arab be a decent family man, when Tarek Al-Ghoussein does not exist? Al-Ghoussein is dismantling that apartheid wall that Israelis have constructed to jail themselves in, and which Americans plan to imitate in their southern border to keep Mexicans out—yet the Mexicans are coming through, as do Palestinians. There is something of Diego Rivera’s crowded paintings in Al-Ghoussein’s deserted landscape.
Studium intra punctum: For Al-Ghoussein, the in and out of his art and politics, home and habitat, private fantasies and public pictures, are one and the same.
Living in an Acronym
Tarek Al-Ghoussein was born in Kuwait in 1962 to Palestinian parents. Both his parents were born and raised in Palestine, but left their homeland because they did not exist. A non-existent little boy, Al-Ghoussein left Kuwait three months after his birth, living for years in Japan and returning only to finish high school. He did not exist and lived as a nomad. After studying in the United States and traveling across the Middle East, for the past ten years he has lived and worked in an acronym—UAE.
With that itinerary, Al-Ghoussein is the child of the 1967 war, when more of Palestine was lost to Israel; of the Black September 1970, when masses of Palestinians were murdered or expelled from Jordan; of the 1973 war, when more of Israel became a military base of the United States; of the Camp David Accord (1978)—by which Palestinians were abandoned by a major Arab state; of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988)—when two presumably staunch supporters of the Palestinian cause went murderously against each other; and then of the collective uprising of Palestinians against their colonial occupiers in the First Intifada (1987–1993), followed soon by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait (1990), the First Gulf War (1990–1991) and a massive expansion of the US military in the region; to be followed by the Oslo Accord (1993) and the Wye River Memorandum (1998)—each shallower than the other in securing Palestinian national aspirations while Israeli settlers continued to steal more Palestinian land; and then of the Second/al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000), soon punctuated by the events of 9/11, to be followed by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the commencement of the Afghan War (2001–present), the Second Gulf War (2003–present), and then the Israeli military entrapment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza—the largest prison on the planet. When you look at the vacated serenity of Al-Ghoussein’s mannered compositions, you need to see the troubled waters he has successfully managed to repress and sublate into those assured formalisms of the sandy earth and bluish skies. That kind of expansive formalism and compositional serenity is booby-trapped. You walk on the hidden landmines beneath the surface of their deceptive formalism at your own peril. Beware!
Al-Ghoussein’s series of Self-Portraits cast him in settings where he becomes part of the listless scenery, open-ended vistas, odd and opposing obstacles, spaces where he is (not) located. What exactly does it mean to be a Palestinian born in Kuwait, raised around the globe, educated in the United States and now living in the UAE? If you are a Palestinian, what in the world are you doing in Kuwait? If you live in Kuwait, or live and work in an acronym, why in the world would you want to call yourself any form of hyphenated Palestinian? What a waste of precious life to wonder what your identity is; does a flower—a bird, a river, a sea—wonder “where do you come from?” There is something uncanny about Al-Ghoussein being exhibited in Dubai, carrying as he does an almost ancient wound into the postmortem site of a seemingly spotless citation, a capitalist wet-dream called UAE on planet nowhere.
On the sites of his Self-Portraits, Al-Ghoussein is a Palestinian by proxy, a native by affinity, a long-distance Palestinian. He has not been to Palestine—can anyone? The contravening irony is called “Israel.” Why bother? Why suffer and join the struggle by proxy? What are these allegories of dispossession doing crowding the fine mind of Tarek Al-Ghoussein? He, the individual, can get on a car, a bus, a train, an airplane and travel anywhere he wants. Right? Why picture himself with the suffering Palestinians incarcerated in their own homeland, living their lives between this machsom and the next, this military checkpoint and the next, this humiliation and the next? Al-Ghoussein brings the military barriers to his visual site, to his perturbed imagination, as if toys from a distant and alienating clime, culture, and game. His is a pretraumatic syndrome. No wonder that he has opted to live in an acronym, which should always remain an acronym. Homeland no longer means anything, and thus neither does exile or, even worse, diaspora. No one is any longer in exile or diaspora, because everyone is in exile and diaspora. For all intents and purposes, Al-Ghoussein lives behind and through the camera that shoots him hidden in front of his fabricated landscapes. Those evident fabrications (just like a UAE) reveal otherwise invisible banalities. Al-Ghoussein is the artist of these invisible banalities, not of evil (as Hannah Arendt surmised), but of barefacedness. Even the Afrikaners packed up their apartheid state and colonial indecency in South Africa and called it a day. But not Zionism. There is a barefaced banality to a European colonialism carrying on into the twenty-first century with such unparalleled vulgarity that can only be matched by the equal barbarity of the US imperial hooliganism that accredits and accompanies it. With all other non-existent Palestinians, the whole world now lives in an acronym that has lost all reference to any meaningful constellation of emotive registers. Look at Al-Ghoussein’s Self-Portraits: Palestinians exemplify the morally bankrupt world that pays the price of the Jewish Shoa with the Palestinian Nakba.
No wonder: Palestinian art does not exist, for its metaphors always lag behind its parables, and its allegories are always in a state of disbelief and in want of catachresis. The catachrestic visionary of a denial, where the picture cannot stand for the pictured—that is how Al-Ghoussein portrays himself—as an anamnesis of forgetful aberrations.
Visual catachresis always works through the inner economy of abusing a power language that has disempowered itself. Al-Ghoussein’s visual minimalism is perforce voluntary. He visually vacates in order politically to accuse. His J’accuse pulls no punches. His politics are not forced on his pronounced formalism, nor does he force them on you, but to ignore them is dangerous. Like his kindred souls Mona Hatoum and Elia Suleiman, Al-Ghoussein casts an aesthetic formalism on the political, exactly at the moment that he disallows the political (politics as usual) overwhelming the autonomy of his formalism. Thus located on the borderline of formal autonomy and political engagement, the making of a Palestinian aesthetics is built on the historical necessity of testimony and, as such, is in accordance with a nation that cannot thoroughly narrate (Edward Said’s soliciting “Permission to Narrate” [1984] notwithstanding) and it has been wont to aberrate since its inception by denial. Thus trapped, the Palestinian artist entraps: His spectacle is spectral—it haunts its haunters. The Israeli grandparents may have chased Al-Ghoussein out of Palestine, but the Israeli grandchildren will learn from him the art of begging his pardon.
Visual brevity, the soul of his pictorial wit, has a genealogy outside of his acronym of residency. Al-Ghoussein’s figurative allegories work as visual maqamah, a distinct literary genre (in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu), in which metaphoric anecdotes are written in virtuoso narrative rhymed prose/saj’ with staccato poetic intervals for at once edifying and performative purposes. Central to the stylistic mannerism of maqamah was the prose stylist virtuosity, which in the case of Al-Ghoussein translates into dazzling formalism. Equally important to maqamah is the central character of a rogue character, which dazzles and fascinates the narrator/spectator at one and the same time. The anecdotal brevity of Al-Ghoussein’s visual maqamat is at the narrative root of what Kevin Mitchell terms his “thick horizons,” which invariably point to the figurative agitation of the landscape in which Al-Ghoussein at once places and erases himself. His self-portraits in disguise form an absented presence, just like Hanzala in Naji al-Ali’s cartoons: a witness, standing for the rest of us, who are not in the picture and yet who, by virtue of Hanzala’s turned back, are standing in for the picture. Eliminate the testimonial presence of Al-Ghoussein’s (Hanzala-like) figure and his pictures became vacuous, releasing his spectators from the moral implications of the frame—the frame becomes distancing, alienating, spectacular. Palestinian self-portraits—such as Al-Ghoussein’s photographs, Elia Suleiman’s films, Nizar Hassan and Mohammad Bakri’s documentaries Ijtiyah (2003) and Jenin, Jenin (2002), respectively—all gesture back to Naji al-Ali’s Hanzala, sustained testimonials in face of sustained denial. We may of course formally exonerate Al-Ghoussein’s landscape self-portraits from his person and politics, though at the risk of assimilating him backward to other photographers, other landscapes, other self-portraits. That he may remind you of this or that photographer is a ruse. Of course he does. Of course they do. You must stay focused on the spot where his formalism feeds on the pain that gives him and his audience the pleasure of watching Palestine performed, and there resist similitude and dwell on particularity.
Living in an acronym liberates the artist from all the pretensions and assurances of a targeted audience. As a Palestinian artist who does not exist, Al-Ghoussein is first and foremost the artist of all those abused laborers from near and afar who come to the acronym to share his non-existence.
Narrations and Aberrations
How can Al-Ghoussein be seen as the visual chronicler of an art with “Palestine” as a frame of its reference? In diverse and divergent theories of nationalism, the element of narration has been at once evident and overriding. German Romanticists like Fichte and Herder thought and narrated nationalism as primordial. Marxists theorists like Vladimir Lenin thought and tolerated it as a way station toward a socialist revolution, while Rosa Luxembourg completely opposed it for that very reason, and Leon Trotsky thought it a transient site of overriding permanence in revolutionary uprisings. Modernist theorists like Ernest Gellner have thought it coterminous with Industrialization, while Benedict Anderson believed it a by-product of print-capitalism. Meanwhile, theorists such as Anthony D. Smith have offered ethno-symbolist theories of nationalism, as Partha Chatterjee has shown the reversed colonial politics that informs and animates it.
Common to all these cases (for or against nationalism) is the fact that bourgeois nationalism thrives on a narrative and epistemic closure in which nations narrate their own historical premises, traumatic dramas, and cathartic resolutions—and now in the work of Homi Bhabha bourgeois nationalism has even theorized its “liminal” spaces where race, class, and gender may overcome the nationalist limitations on their respective forces, intersect and thus transcend their demands on moral conscience, which Bhabha designates and dismisses as their “metaphysics.” Bhabha’s “interstices,” where intersubjective experiences take place, are where identity divisions paradoxically collapse into a miasmatic meandering, and whereby even a European colonial settlement may find itself in a “postcolonial” condition, celebrate its “independence,” translate Bhabha’s works into Hebrew, and invite the postcolonial theorist of their state of liminality for a talk among “Israeli postcolonialists.”
In the postcolonial theories of the sort that Bhabha represents, even a European colonial settlement can find “strategies of representation or empowerment.” In the shadow of that empowerment and, as bourgeois nationalism narrates itself into power, even in moments and spaces of its liminal interstices, Palestinian self-narrations (visual or verbal, aesthetic or poetic, violent or peaceful) thrive on repetitions of aberrations, on persistent aberrations—and it is precisely that aberration that defies theoretical fancy footwork of the sort that Bhabha can afford and demands a clear, unambiguous moral (not theoretical) voice of where, why and how we stand, and we cannot do or think otherwise. “Palestinian” self-narration, which must always remain within two sets of qualifying double quotation marks, preempts the closed-circuit possibility of closure because its traumatic commencement is (always/already) delayed—because its central trauma (Nakba) has never experienced the cathartic moment of recognition and acknowledgment, of truth and reconciliation, and as such, it is always a deferred destination that troubles all its points and paradigmatics of origin.
In its parenthetical particularity, Palestinian counter-narrations thrive on aberration, and as a result posit a different manner of aesthetic mimesis, which makes Palestinian art decidedly contrarian to the two polar opposites of our received aesthetics—from Immanuel Kant to Jean Baudrillard, from an aesthetic of European domination to an aesthetic of European indifference. The Palestinian mode of defiant aesthetic, dwelling as it does on its own crisis, the Kantian subject formation, negationally corroborated by Baudrillard, as the principal sovereign subject of what the European sees or cannot see as sublime, is dismantled via the impossibility of a subject that must look for the beautiful not as a will to power but as a will to resist power—and thus the closest we can get in a militant mode to what Gianni Vattimo calls il pensiero debole.
Palestine is visually forbidden, wiped out of the global map, while Israel has just celebrated the 60th anniversary of what it calls its “independence.” A band of European colonialists, running away from the criminal racism of their fellow-Europeans, steal a colonized people’s homeland and call their armed robbery “independence.” In the face of that irony—fed by generations of Palestinian pain and suffering—did Mahmud Darwish succeed? Did his poetry, or Edward Said’s prose, or Ghassan Kanafani’s fiction, or Naji al-Ali’s sketches, or Mona Hatoum’s painful baggage, or Emily Jacir’s satire, or Elia Suleiman’s pantomimic paralysis, or Sameh Zoabi’s bitten bullet and hidden Keffieh, or Annemarie Jacir and Hany Abu Assad’s iconoclastic intrusions—become the metaphor of a nation in desperation—or do all forms of Palestinian suspension of the normative by the accusatory posit an aberration that negate the normative narration of nations into history? Though a Palestinian artist who does not exist, Al-Ghoussein did not fall from the sky. Even non-existent artists have a history.
Once upon a time, Palestine was the name of a homeland, a people, an ordinary map on an ordinary planet—and then it became a sign, a fixed signifier, meaning everything and nothing in particular—except defiance, negation, resistance, Muqawamah writ allegorically large. Nation as narration has a darker shadow in historical aberrations from that narration that suspends its conceptual acuity, interrupts its narrative continuity, and postpones its mimetic correspondence to reality. You may impose a map on the topography of the globe—but you remain a European colonial occupation. Nations are colonially redrawn without advanced warning to postcolonial theorists. In tune with that aberration, Al-Ghoussein’s photographic memory of things there but not there interrupts the easy flow of memorial forgetfulness: visual memories for forgetfulness, as Darwish would say.
Narrating the Unwritten
Bourgeois nationalism is a closed circuit narrative. It begins with an anticolonial outburst, crescendos with sustained anticolonial battles, comes to a closure with independence, and thereafter transmutes into an abstract and irrelevant academic pastime with codex classicus like Postcoloniality. As a closed circuit narrative, bourgeois nationalism has its heroes in Gandhi and Mosaddegh, its theorists in Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee, its hyper-liminal diversionary tacticians like Homi Bhabha—and as such it becomes a narrative within which even a European colonial settlement called “Israel” can celebrate its “independence.”
In the unwritten shadow of this narrative opens a gushing wound informing a metaphor: Palestine is an aberration to nations as narrations. It refuses to open and cannot close. Beyond and through its transmutation into a metaphor, Palestine is counter-narrated in a variety of ways. It has been sublated into literary allegories (Ghassan Kanafani); visualized in successive cinematic renditions (from Mustafa Abu-Ali, through Michel Khleifi, to Elia Suleiman); satirized/eroticized at one and the same time (Emily Jacir); immortalized in the cartoonish character of Hanzala (Naji al-Ali); with enduring influence on other Palestinian art forms (Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Mohammad Bakri); it has been wrapped around a stone and thrown at cruel fate (Intifada); it has been eloquently formulated (Edward Said); belligerently expressed (Joseph Massad); mildly meandered (Rashid Khalidi); and yet its central trauma is still narrated by a Lebanese writer (Elias Khouri) and filmed by an Egyptian filmmaker (Yousry Nasrallah).
The art of Al-Ghoussein is the most recent visual accent of that succession of narrative aberrations—successful attempts failing to convince themselves or others of the enormity of injustice perpetrated on a people. In imagining the invisible, of the denied, Al-Ghoussein’s work is representative of a mimetic dissonance in Palestinian art that makes it (always/already) politically potent precisely because it is semiotically delayed. Palestinian art can never deliver on its promises, never be conclusive in its premises, always lacking closure in its episodic narratives. There is a designated deferral about Palestinian aesthetics that makes it (fortunately) never museumized. You can never anthropologize Palestinian art because its political point is always chasing after its conclusive evidence, denying it resolution and resisting to rest in peace. Palestinian art is indecisive in its aesthetics, irresolute in its politics, vacillating when pointing, wavering when ascertaining, and above all, faltering when required to submit to any critical authority. The mimetic distance between an apricot pit and a grenade (in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention/Yadun Ilahi [2002]), or between a man walking while sporting a kafiyyeh and a terrorist about to hijack a plane (in Al-Ghoussein’s Self-Portraits) is covered by a will to visual power that explodes in the face of its own factual fracture between sign and signifier.
Palestinian art is an aberration, an art of aberration. As Golda Meir, an art curator, would say, Palestinian art does not exist—and precisely in its non-existence, it occupies a spacious site on which the entire world becomes Palestine. The Ministry of Distraction in Israel is always on the lookout for alternative atrocities that happen around the world—in Darfur, in Kurdistan, in Chechnya, etc.—first to use the global distraction to grab more Palestinian lands and then to ask why the world is concentrating on Palestine given all the other atrocities in the world. Concentrate on Palestine because Palestine is a gushing wound that informs a universal metaphor, a metaphor that (as all other metaphors) points to something more than itself, through (but always more than) itself. Palestine and Palestinians have paid too much, suffered too much, endured too much, to settle for a bourgeois nation-state, with a flag, a national soccer team, an airline, and a film festival.
“Nous sommes tous Américains” the French daily Le Monde declared soon after the events of 9/11, in an editorial dated September 13, 2001. Indeed. The events of 9/11 were the global signature of one senseless but spectacular act of violence, a spectacle that meant nothing because it meant everything, an oversaturated signifier floating to overwhelming nullity. Le Monde has never declared that the French are all Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, etc.—though the Palestinians must declare that they are all Afghans, Iraqis, or of anywhere else that Palestine as a metaphor matters. Palestinians will not be of Palestine if they cannot own up to Tom Joad and declare with him:
Fella ain’t got a soul of his own. Just a little piece of a big soul. One big soul that belongs to everybody… I’ll be around in the dark—I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look—wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry, and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raised, and livin’ in the houses they built, I’ll be there, too.8
The central trauma of Palestine remains untold. Nakba remains untellable. The only visual evidence of Nakba now on global stage is based on a book by the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Gate to the Sun (2000), made into a film (2004) by an Egyptian filmmaker, Yousry Nasrallah, and a terrible film at that, for in 2004 it is telling a story of exodus after Atom Egoyan successfully dismantled the cinematic manner of telling epic narratives of a catastrophe (the Armenian genocide) in his “Ararat” (2002). The Holocaust Industry, as Norman Finkelstein has demonstrated, has cornered the market on telling the catastrophe for the sake of abusing it to abuse other people. The only way that the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, or Palestinian Nakba can be told is if it is counter-narrated in a manner that dovetails with other catastrophes. As the Israeli documentary filmmaker Avi Mograbi has done in his Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay/Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005), the only way that successive Jewish dispossessions, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust (all of a European vintage) can be told is if they are related to the daily terror that Palestinians experience in their homeland; and in the same vein any telling of the Palestinian story that does not actively empathize with the Jewish sufferings throughout the ages and, in turn, resonate with the suffering of people in Afghanistan and Iraq today is utterly useless. Sabra and Shatila are no longer merely Palestinian refugee camps. They are slave markets in which Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Afghan illegal immigrants comingle in desperation with Palestinian refugees, searching for non-existent and illegal work. There is a direct and dark line that marks the depth of human suffering and links Auschwitz and Buchenwald to Tel al-Zaatar, Sabra and Shatila and passes through Afghanistan and Iraq. If you cannot see and sit in mourning on that transcendent line you are wasting your time mesmerized by the aesthetic formality of Al-Ghoussein’s work.
How can the Palestinian aesthetic sensibility, thus circumscribed, be staged—in visual terms that resonate, artistic manners that matter? As the expansive examples of Al-Ghoussein’s oeuvre now demonstrate, any constellation of symbols bordering on signification oscillates between Societas and Semiosis. Photography as Punctum, the semiotic citation of photography as a purposeful constellation of signs, is conducive to significant productions of meaning. Solipsistic semiosis at the roots of photography points to a socially significant set of signs and the objects they visually entail. The tenuous (im)balance between chaotic signs and formalized signifiers posits staged photography as a carnivalesque occasion where the interdictory and transgressive (in Philip Rieff’s theory of culture) become momentarily remissive. Photography as Studium both belongs and does not belong to the society that produces or occasions it. It is luminous on a liminal space, and this liminality very much informs its luminosity.
Consider the work of the Iranian photographer Bahman Jalali9 as it examines the desert architecture of existing architectonic certainties and then compare it with Al-Ghoussein’s landscape self-portraits whereby the borderline between the human body and the body of the implicitly cited nation is trespassed—or perhaps more precisely meandered between what Agamben calls bare life, or la vita nuda, or zoë and a particular mode of life, or qualified life, or bios. You will notice that while Jalali’s photography works with assured broad brushes, Al-Ghoussein’s works with equally assured staccatos. Jalali works through confident visual narrations, Al-Ghoussein through purposeful narrative aberrations. Jalali works through a minimum narrative distraction from the visual (even in his photography of war and revolution), Al-Ghoussein through a minimum concentration on the narrative progression of the visual. Jalali works through a Nietzschean will to power, Al-Ghoussein through a Saidian will to resist power. Jalali works from the overstretched confidence of an Iranian national consciousness, photographing through his will to narrate, Al-Ghoussein from the overevident anxiety of a stateless Palestinian, picturing through his will to aberrate. But both Jalali and Al-Ghoussein are counter-Kantian in their visual memories and aesthetics, so far as Kant’s Critique of Judgment posits only the European as the sovereign subject and the rest of the world as his (and always his) knowable world.
In that particular narrative mode, Al-Ghoussein’s photography now triumphantly builds on the works of Mona Hatoum and Emily Jacir to posit the Palestinian aesthetic as the will to resist power within the two opposite ends of Eurocentric aesthetics—extended from Immanuel Kant’s Aesthetics of Domination to Jean Baudrillard’s Aesthetics of Indifference. This visual reversal of the colonial subject places the aesthetic of subjection we have inherited from Kant within quotation marks and adversely demands a re-reading of his three Critiques. Keep in mind that Kant was principally responsible for articulating a European sovereign subject at the cost of all other peoples—thus lumped together and denied historical agency. Read in this vein, the first critic, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), constitutes the European (and the European alone) as the solitary knowing subject—sovereign and presiding over the world. In the form of his moral philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) offers freedom of will as the normative force of a knowable world that he puts at the disposal of the (European) knowing subject he had earlier articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason. As evident in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment, the realm of the aesthetics for Kant is where he puts his first two critics—the knowing subject and the knowable world—to test, that his constituted European subject is capable of navigating the indecisive subjectivity of the beautiful and the sublime. Far more than being racially inferior to the European subject in matters of aesthetic, the non-European (the Oriental) is part and parcel of the objectified (knowable) world, at the cognitive mercy of the European knowable subject.
Recast on that aesthetic of resistance to visual domination, the mimetic distance between a real apartheid wall encircling Palestinian homes, villages, towns and humanity and a fictive wall that Al-Ghoussein manufactures in the middle of nowhere is collapsed by a will to visualize power, that liberates the colonial subject from the aesthetic end of a philosophical de-subjection that began with Kant and will have to end with Bhabha’s liminal writing of the colonizer as the victim of his own storytelling. As Rashid Khalidi believes:
If there is to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, it depends on the Palestinians’ understanding the massive disadvantages they labor under in fighting a struggle for liberation against the heirs of the victims of the Holocaust, in the growing shadow of worldwide Islamophobia. It depends on their unity and on their adopting the appropriate strategy and tactics for this difficult task, in mobilizing the powerful moral force of their cause and the remarkable strengths of Palestinians under occupation and in the diaspora who have withstood extreme pressures but have neither submitted nor despaired.10
That indeed they have neither submitted nor despaired is a fact firmly rooted as much in a creative imagination as in a defiant determination—taking a picture with one hand and throwing a stone at the cruel fate with another. You can take your pick and choose the hand, but you cannot disregard, dismiss, or deny the weight of the other: And that is the stabilizing weight that holds artists like Al-Ghoussein in balance.
*First published in Tarek Al-Ghoussein: in Absentia (The Third Line, 2009).
1See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in his Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969): 217–252.
2Al-Ghoussein, “Artist Statement”, Absentia,https://seththompson.info/essays/palestinian-identity-the-work-of-tarek-al-ghoussein/.
3Ibid.
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mccain-sticks-up-for-obama-at-rally/
7Ibid.
8John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992): 419.
9See “Capturing the Illusion of Reality: Mapping the Visual Subconscious of a People in the Photography of Bahman Jalali” in this volume.
10See Rashid Khalidi, “Palestine: Liberation Deferred” (The Nation, May 26, 2008).