I’ve been couch surfing and (then) moving into a new place.
The cultural highlights of my last month in New York, however, have been seeing Tariq Ali and Norman Finkelstein, among others, talk at the Brecht Forum a few weeks back about Barak Obama’s foreign policy. The general consensus was that his foreign policy, despite his hopeful rhetoric, was a continuation of self-defeating imperialist American tendencies. Also, an interesting and inevitable discussion opened up over whether one should vote, nonetheless, for Obama (the panel was split). There was also quite a bit of discussion of the situation in Pakistan. Ali said that war in Pakistan was being pursued “as an alibi for the failure of the Afghanistan war.”
Last week, I had the thrill of meeting the great poet Adonis. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear him read his own poetry, which he did at an event in honor of Edward Said. I was told by people who attended that it was fantastic–Adonis read his long poem on New York, “قبر من اجل نيو يورك” (“A Tomb for New York”). A few days later, I attended an informal talk he gave about Islam and literature. Adonis talked about the historic divide between literature and religion, between poets that celebrated the joys of wine and caliphs who used religion to shore up their political power. He posed a few provocative questions: he asked, for example, how one can explain the fact that if Arabic is the language of God, it was nonetheless an existing language, spoken by pagans, before God’s revelation? But overall his talk was replete with simple oppositions (perhaps expecting a US audience that wasn’t that familiar with the subject)–it posited a historic separation between art and religion, and set modern Arab writers up as the descendants of rebellious, hedonist medieval poets, small creators competing with the big Creator.
On a side note, I was shocked and dismayed by my utter failure to find a book of Adonis’ poetry in New York. I looked for his work at three or four bookstores, hoping to get a copy for him to sign, and found nothing.
Even if Obama’s heart and mind are in the right place regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict, unless he’s got enough courage and integrity to risk committing political suicide and get completely Jimmy Cartered the misery will still go on. Note that Bush has lowered the bar so much when it comes to pressuring Israel, that anything less than total unconditional support for Israeli policies, no matter how ultra far right and outrageous they might go, by any future administration would be perceived as anti Israeli by Aipac and other Likud front groups, which is a big handicap that even Bill Clinton with his largely pro Israeli policy didn’t have as he was at some very rare moments able to exert some pseudo pressure on Netanyahu to make him make some cosmetic and non consequential concessions, a thing that would be very hard to do by any future administration.
Regarding Norman Finkelstein, now that’s someone with an unlimited amount of integrity and courage, and see what price he paid for that.
Hi Mohammed. I agree with you. It’s tough to be an American voter who cares about politicians’ stance on Israel-Palestine, because basically there are no politicians with a reasonable stance.
Finkelstein, who I greatly admire and was thrilled to see in person, ended the panel debate by saying that discussing whether one should vote for mainstream candidates was beside the point, a waste of leftists’ energy (other members disagreed with him, and I disagree that supporting Obama in this election is a waste of energy).