Combat in" A World Not for Us:" Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani

186 Pages·2016·1.99 MB·English

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Combat in "A World Not for Us:" Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and Ghassan
Kanafani
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nq712hb
Author
Silmi, Amirah Mohammad
Publication Date
2016

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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Combat in “A World not for Us:” Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and
Ghassan Kanafani
By
Amirah Mohammad Silmi
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
Requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Rhetoric
in the
Graduate Division
Of the
University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Trinh, T. Minh-ha, Chair.
Professor Pheng Cheah
Professor Donna V. Jones
Professor Samera Esmeir

Summer 2016

1

Abstract

Combat in a “World Not for Us:” Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and
Ghassan Kanafani

By

Amirah Mohammad Silmi

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Trinh, T. Minh-ha, Chair

This dissertation explores how the writings of two colonized writers, Aimé Césaire and
Ghassan Kanafani, constitute in themselves acts of freedom by combatting a rationalized
knowledge that determines what is to be known and what is to be unknown. The dissertation
underlines how an act of freedom, as exemplified by the texts of both writers, entails courage in
confronting the cruel in a colonized life, as it entails the bravery of taking the risk of tearing open
shields of concealment and denial.
The dissertation is not an investigation of the similarities and/or differences between the
two writers. It is rather an “excavation” of their texts for points where there remain fragments
hidden in margins or buried in gaps that point to other lives, other modes of being, in which the
colonized share more than their colonized being. The dissertation is thus a relating of their writings,
it is a linking, beyond classificatory categories, of the spaces where their writings mobilize and
evoke each other, a search for spaces where they resonate.
In both writers’ texts, the word (poetic image) is a material object, which carries with it the
load of the life that gave birth to it. In its materiality, the word carries a force that allows it to
mobilize another. This study is thus not an attempt to extract the reality of the colonized from
Kanafani’s and Césaire’s texts, but rather the focus here is on the latter’s creative ability, their
moving force, their effects as acts of combat.
The dissertation demonstrates how it is in the realm of passions that both writers’ texts
operate to allow for a non-rationalized knowledge. To be colonized is to live a degenerate,
stagnant, and dead life. The mobilization of passions become not only a mobilization of other
sources and ways of knowing, but more importantly a mobilization of the forces of life. The combat
in both writers is not against an external entity, but it takes the form of a series of battles through
which the colonized seeks to rid himself of his colonized being, to shed it off, to allow for the
possibility of another life. Their texts are, therefore, not revolutionary in the sense that they call
for action, but rather in that they do not allow for an anesthetized being.
A free practice does not allow for a confined being, including imprisonment in an identity
or within an already defined historical trajectory. The writings of Aimé Césaire and Ghassan
Kanafani refuse to position the colonized as the Other, who seeks the position of the Same. Entailed
in this refusal, their defiance of existing discourses on the colonized. Their combat is not one of a
politics of identity. Their writings dismantle any established identity while blocking the possibility
2

of establishing one. Moreover, part of their defiance to colonial as well as anti-colonial discourses
is their rejection of a historical discourse of the Revolution that leaves the colonized as the Other
and past of the colonizer. This refusal takes the form of maintaining that freedom is a practice not
an end to be achieved. Acting outside the mode of being of exchange values, the fidai/rebel, in
both writers, is not to be asked why he is willing to sacrifice his life for a dignified life. For a free
act cannot be confined by questions of utility or return.
i

Table of Contents

- Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------iii

- Chapter One: Shedding off Colonialism-------------------------------------------------------1
- Affirmation as a Practice of Freedom -------------------------------------------------1
- A Dead Life -------------------------------------------------------------------------------5
- Anger and Pride: The Return of Life --------------------------------------------------9
- Dreams, Hopes, Horizons ---------------------------------------------------------------11
- The Faith of the Blind -------------------------------------------------------------------16
- Freedom from the Revolution? ---------------------------------------------------------21
- Our Struggles, Their Revolution--------------------------------------------------------24

- Chapter Two: The Ethics of Fighting-----------------------------------------------------------28
- To Act on One’s Land-------------------------------------------------------------------28
- A Power Over Power--------------------------------------------------------------------31
- Right as a Practice of Freedom---------------------------------------------------------35
- The Freedom of Being Attached-------------------------------------------------------40
- A Fighting “Spirit” ----------------------------------------------------------------------44
- The Poetics of Combat------------------------------------------------------------------47

- Chapter Three: “Man is a Cause” --------------------------------------------------------------56
- A Being of Equivalence ----------------------------------------------------------------56
- The Supreme Being of Lack------------------------------------------------------------60
- Subverting Representation--------------------------------------------------------------64
- The Other Side of the Mirror? ---------------------------------------------------------65
- The Diminished Man of Civilization--------------------------------------------------70
- The Nihilism of a Weak Being---------------------------------------------------------74
- Against Death, for Life -----------------------------------------------------------------79
- Al-‘Asheq (The Lover) ------------------------------------------------------------------86

- Chapter Four: “A World Not for Us” ----------------------------------------------------------88
- A Deadened Present----------------------------------------------------------------------88
- The Weight of the Present on the Past-------------------------------------------------93
- A Quest for the Sources of Life---------------------------------------------------------99
- Interrupting an Endless Deferment ----------------------------------------------------104
- Memory, A World Beyond------------------------------------------------------------- 109
- A “Different Horizon” ------------------------------------------------------------------115

- Chapter Five: “Spear-Pointed Words” ---------------------------------------------------------121
- A Liberation Discourse? ----------------------------------------------------------------121
- The Prison that is Writing about the Revolution ----------------------------------- 128
- The Conscious and its Other -----------------------------------------------------------136
- “Joyous Surrender” --------------------------------------------------------------------- 141
ii

- The Marroon, The Vagabond, The Su’luk -------------------------------------------143
- al-Thawra --------------------------------------------------------------------------------146
- Telling of Something Else -------------------------------------------------------------148

Conclusion: “Something that Does Not Go Away” --------------------------------------------------152
References -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------156
Bibliography-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------163
iii

Introduction

A Connection?

In 2010, we were reading Michel Cliff’s “No Telephone to Heaven,” in a class on World
Literature. Different issues from the novel were raised in class discussion, but to the question about
the scene in which the slave killed his master (Cliff here replicates the scene from Aimé Césaire’s
“And the Dogs Were Silent”), there was only silence.
Why the silence? I was expecting a political debate, a discussion for which the class time
would not be enough, but there was only silence. Some smiled, why smile? When is it that we are
no longer able to speak? What is it that leaves us with nothing to say, how is it that we lose words
at certain moments?
This was not the first time I was confronted with this question. During the Israeli invasion
of the West Bank in 2002, I was a teacher. Unable to discipline the class into a real lesson, I thought
it might be better if I let them discuss the events. They were a very disorderly class, dividing has
been a good strategy to rule, so I divided them into three groups: one group was the Palestinians,
they needed to present their case, the second played the role of the Israelis, they needed to defend
their acts, the third were the “international community,” who would judge what and how things
should be done. To my surprise but also disappointment, the Palestinian group was defenseless,
language betrayed them, they were unable to articulate any logical statement about being
colonized, they gave us invectives, revolutionary slogans, screams, they were even more unruly as
a group than they were before the division… the group representing the Israelis did very well with
language, they very easily wore the mask and played the role, reiterating every statement that had
been used to justify the acts of an occupying power. How can this be possible? Michel Foucault
would say discourse, that inextricable relation between knowledge, language and power. Yes, but
does this mean that the colonized cannot speak, and if they did, is it only the language of their
colonizer that they could speak, even when they are fighting that colonizer?
I believed this to be a fact for a long time. Every utterance is an act of representation, every
uttered word is a being and a manifestation of a discourse, the different that we might think and
know, although existent, cannot find a place in language.
But it was when I read Césaire’s play, that my conviction was shaken. He said something,
many things, that spoke of what I thought could never be put in words. Césaire knew what it is to
be colonized, but more importantly he was able to put it in words. How is it that his words carried
that which cannot be communicated in language, how do they make us know without re-presenting
that which is known?
How can the Antillean speak to the Palestinian? How can Palestine be related to
Martinique? An appendix island, made of the slavery and colonialism of the New World, to a
country that connects the three continents of the Old World? What brings a poet like Aimé Césaire,
usually associated with surrealism and/or negritude with a writer like Ghassan Kanafani, usually
associated with realism and socialism? What brings the political representative with the fighter?
what brings a country that is known as that of the fedayeen (or terrorists), with a country that voted
for departmentalization? I have been asked these questions so many times, and I would say there
is a connection. Nothing that is obvious on the surface of reality or on the surface of the two
writer’s texts. But maybe this is the point, these are only superficial differences, mere descriptions,
classificatory constructions, a layer that covers “a profound being” (to use Césaire’s words), a
being in which the Antillean and the Palestinian share more than what is directly visible to us.
iv

There is a connection. It had been years since I read Kanafani, and it was when I read
Césaire’s “And the Dogs Were Silent,” that I remembered Kanafani, I remembered Hamid from
“All That’s Left to you.” What is the connection? Was it the power of the image given us? Was it
the weight of their words that has the power to break through language itself? Was it the act of
violence, its cruelty? Was it its “surreal” being, its irrational inevitability, its power to suspend
discourse? Or the infinite space that it opened leading us to no definite point? Is it Césaire’s
rejection of the narrative of the End of the World, or is it Kanafani’s declaration of this world as
not for us? Is it their pessimism or their obstinate faith in life? I could never decide, each time the
question was raised I would pick one to give as an answer, but the one picked would lead me to
the rest.
I do not claim their truth; the connection could be something else. But one truth I am certain
of: it was Césaire who reminded me of Kanafani. But this dissertation is not an attempt to establish
similarities, it is rather an attempt to reach these points where two words uttered by two different
writers, from two different countries, mobilize and evoke each other, a search for the spaces where
they resonate.
This dissertation is a study of the writings of Kanafani and Césaire, it is not a study of their
lives, their inner thoughts or psychology. Foucault has argued that the author’s name plays a
classificatory function, it “serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse...”
(Aesthetics 211). It is this function of classification that I want to try to avoid in this dissertation;
what I want to underline instead is how their writings defy rules of discourse, expose them, show
their truths, I also want to point to those spaces, gaps, and fissures, that their texts open in
discourses on the struggles of the colonized, allowing us another way of seeing and knowing.

The Fighter, The Writer, The Poet.
A Palestinian and a martyr were enough for most writings on Kanafani to be confined to
the mission of extracting his life and death from his texts. His stories are his story and his story is
the story of Palestine. The frame established, the narrative already written by history, the story has
just to be fit in that history; what does not fit into that which is established as the history of Palestine
is to be discarded.
Faisal Darraj in his writings about Kanafani, moves between his life and his texts.
Projecting each on the other, the text is a representation of its author, and the author’s life is where
the meaning of the text is to be sought. Kanafani is thus the refugee Palestinian who seeks an
identity, the defeated who seeks recognition from his enemy. Kanafani is the intellectual of
national liberation, the organic intellectual, the committed intellectual.
Positing the novelist as the fighter and committed intellectual, and his literature as his
weapon, Barbara Harlow, in her study on “resistance literature,” does not hesitate to declare the
intention of the enemy behind assassinating Kanafani. Arguing that Kanafani saw in literature a
means of resistance as important as armed resistance, “armed resistance is not just the husk, but
the very fruit of cultivation forcing its roots deep into the land” (Kanafani qtd. in Harlow 11), she
can then project the same position on those who assassinated him. Harlow here is arguing that
“cultural resistance” is as threatening to imperialism as armed resistance is, to prove her point she
evokes the assassination of both Amilcar Cabral and Kanafani. But how can we know whether
they were killed for their writings or because they never let writing be a substitute for another fight,
don’t we run the risk of reducing their lives to only one aspect of it?
Could it not be that it was the fight that gave their texts the value that now allows the critics
to call them resistance or committed literature. Yusuf Idris, in his introduction to the second
v

volume of Kanafani’s Collected Works, argues that it was the martyrdom of the writer, he gives
the example of both Kanafani and Che Guevara, which turned their words into words made of
blood and flesh, that gave them life and truth. For Idris, the immortality that the martyr achieves
is also given to his words (23).
If not about his life, then it should be about his people that Kanafani writes. For Ahmad
Abu Matar, what Kanafani speaks of in his stories is limited to Palestine. The writer either
expresses the social and political movement of the Palestinian people, or he prophetically foresees
its movement (205). Kanafani’s literature is thus studied as a whole because it followed the
movement of the Palestinian people, each of the novels expressing a certain stage in it (229).
Idris too thought of Kanafani’s work as a whole organic being, or “a whole work of art that
is larger than the sum of its constituent parts, and which in the end makes the “story” of Ghassan
Kanafani.” Nevertheless, Idris states that to read Kanafani’s stories each on its own leads to
something else (24).
It is this something else that I seek to explore in Kanafani’s stories. To start from Kanafani
the fighter and the martyr, to posit the writer before the text, is to not only confine and limit the
plural of which it is made as Roland Barthes had it (S/Z), it is also to be complicit in a politics that
exceeds literary criticism, a politics that sought to confine and define the struggle of the Palestinian
fidai as it sought to confine the meaning of his writing. It is to turn the writer who sought the being
of the rebel (Chapter Five), into a function, an ideological one, that of the author (Foucault,
Aesthetics 221-222).
Kanafani’s “Farther than Borders,” rejected the lumping together of all Palestinians into a
case, stripping them of their individuality and differences. Celebrating Kanafani’s martyrdom at
the expense of his stories as well as his life, is keeping the Palestinian, as a case, in his place: a
refugee who should keep his place in the refugee camp, submitting to a present of defeat and
dreaming of an endlessly deferred return to a Palestine now turned into a paradise.
But nothing is kept in its place in Kanafani’s stories, Kanafani rejected the position of the
all-knowing subject who tells of Palestine and its people, as he rejected to give it to any singular
entity. Kanafani could not be confined to a “Palestinian” identity already defined for him. This
rejection is clear in his stories, in which the shifting of positions of the one who tells, the one who
listens, and the one being told of, (Chapter Five), challenges our ability to establish an all-knowing
subject who owns the story. Moreover, by maintaining that which is plural in it, the individual and
the different are also maintained.
Kanafani attempted in his stories an “objective” “he” but his “he” is always shaken by an
implicit “I”, which often invades the “he,” taking its place. Kanafani could never adapt himself to
the position of the actor, I would think he was not clever enough, he lacked the necessary skill; but
it was the skill of adaptation that the free writer failed to have, for adaptation is the condition of
the weak in their inability to confront (Nietzsche, Gay Science).
The poet never shied away from his speaking “I.” His insistence on that which is particular
and different has been either read in the realm of Hegelian dialectical narrative where he is the
Other who seeks the position of the Same (Arnold; Nesbitt), or within a surrealist and/or fascist
narrative (Davis; Scharfman), in which the unconscious of the speaker, (taken to be the poet),
becomes the object of investigation. But, as demonstrated in Chapter Three, the position of the
Other who seeks that of the Same could not be maintained, for Césaire’s speaking “I” follows the
different directions in which life moves.
Jacqueline Leiner has described Césaire as a man with diverse dimensions, who embodies
contradictory and complex traits, that only a cubist portrait might be able to embrace the different