Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon Featured in The Guardian

[Sinan Antoon. Image via Yale University Press] [Sinan Antoon. Image via Yale University Press]

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon Featured in The Guardian

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following profile of Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon was written by Farid Farid andpublished in The Guardian on 3 March 2015.]

“How do you write about a country that is disintegrating?” says Sinan Antoon, on the line from his office at New York University. His words have taken on a more affective valency in recent days, as the notorious militants from Islamic State (Isis) released footage showing the graphic destruction of Assyrian and Akkadian artefacts in Mosul’s central museum.

Talking about the litany of massacres and destructions that the well-funded group has left in the wake of its territorial expansion across Iraq and Syria, Antoon, who describes himself as an Iraqi novelist in America, says “I never imagined Isis.” He was one of a coterie of dissident diasporic Iraqi intellectuals who opposed the 2003 US occupation of his homeland that led to the current post-colonial quagmire.

He explains that during the 1990s, “Iraq was already a society so drained by sanctions, war and dictatorship that to wage another war and with the imperial irresponsibility of the US was bound to produce a chaotic and catastrophic situation.”

In his third novel Ya Maryam (Ave Maria), shortlisted for the 2013 Arabic Booker Prize and with a forthcoming English translation by Maia Tabet, he faithfully reproduces the difficult conversations between an Iraqi Christian family housed in Baghdad while the daily scenes of carnage are painfully recounted. Maha George, one of the main characters, is impatient and helpless with the increased targeting of Christians declaring “churches are being torched, we’re being killed right, left and center, and we are slowly but surely being driven out … The Muslims want to get rid of us, quite simply, so that the country can become theirs alone.”

The older relative she lives with in Baghdad, Yusif, is a bit more historiographic in his argument noting “What do you mean ‘theirs’? The country belongs to everybody, and if it’s anyone’s it’s ours, before anyone else, all the way back to the time of the Chaldeans and from there on down to the Abbasids, the Ottomans and the creation of the modern nation-state. The evidence is there, in all of our museums. We’ve been here from the very beginning. If it isn’t our country, I’d like to know whose it is! Can you tell me?”

The question, read in the context of the latest ransacking of the Mosul museum, becomes unanswerable as the last traces of an indigenous minority are decimated. “Sometimes unintentionally, what I imagine the character would go through ends up happening in real life in Iraq,” he says. “It adds to my continuous mourning.”

Antoon explains that his novel, which explores a church bombing, brings up questions about whether minorities should leave or should stay (the book refers to the terrorist attack of Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean church in Baghdad in December 2010 that left over 50 dead at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida offshoot at the time).

“One of the characters had this fear that Christians would be a relic of the past in Iraq and sadly look at what happened this last summer with Isis and the mass displacement.” He pauses and ruefully ponders, “I guess I am trying to say that I am forced to by the events on the ground to always go back to my characters.”

Isis triggered a geopolitical crisis in June of last year, capitalising on a breakdown of the Iraqi state’s security apparatus by taking control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Hundreds of thousands of Mosul’s Shia and Christian residents had to flee immediately or face the oppressive conditions of living under a terrorist group seeking to establish their model of a caliphate or Islamic state. Christians specifically had to endure the added humiliation of conversion, paying a special tax to their overlords, or exile.

Antoon, who has a doctorate in Arab literature from Harvard University and three novels under his belt, recently won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his novel The Corpse Washer. London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat dubbed it “the Iraqi novel par excellence”. It tracks the travails of Jawad, a young Shia corpse washer from Baghdad, who decides to leave the depressing family business to pursue being a sculptor–his ambitions are cut short by the circumstances of history.

Antoon’s win is even more impressive as he translated his own work from Arabic to English. “I think of the sentence when I translate, concentrating on the mechanics while letting the poetic manifest itself through the body of words. It’s challenging but it’s beautiful because it shows you the horizons of the target language which you are translating,” he adds.

Baghdad has become a “city of ghosts”, but Antoon quickly warns against any facile notions of nostalgia and bygone eras about his beloved city. “The problem that Baghdad has, like other great, iconic cities, is that sometimes the textual Baghdad overshadows the real Baghdad,” he says. His voice suddenly cracks with sadness when talking about Al Mutanabbi, a street made famous for its booksellers and literary cafes.

But he emphatically argues “sadly this happens so often in western media and also in some Arab media, where you take one street or one person or one aspect and that stands for all of culture, in focusing on Al Mutanabbi we forget the larger context in what conditions made the destruction possible” referring to the US military occupation and devolving of the Iraqi state.

Antoon is interested in teasing out the embodied tension of living and working in the country that occupied his homeland, and talks of the sense of estrangement when witnessing the horrors of a protracted conflict. Talking about writing against a backdrop of ravaging violence, he says “oftentimes I am speechless, like many of us are, but we are in the business of words so we have to somehow try and represent the effects of all of this on human beings.”

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412