The truly besieged ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 244th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

I have seen just three of Bernard Bertolucci’s films, The Little Buddha, The Last Emperor and Besieged. The first traces the life story of Siddartha, first prince then ascetic and finally achiever of enlightenment, through three children, each with claims to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan Lama. Bertolucci’s directional finesse offers some scattered philosophical strands; it is a compelling if slow film. The Last Emperor is about Puyi, the last emperor of China and follows his ascent to the throne as a small boy and then to his imprisonment and political ‘rehabilitation’ by the Chinese Communist Party. Besieged is the story of a woman who fled her native village in Africa and works as a housemaid in Rome for a single English pianist and composer.

All three stories speak of incarceration. Siddhartha is first a prisoner of his Royal birth who later realises the deeper, broader and more foreboding imprisonment of the human condition. Puyi is a prisoner of a sweeping historical process. In the third film the principal character, Sandhurai, is besieged by the condition of exile, forced separation from her husband and the growing feelings for her master.

In a sense, we are all incarcerated in prisons of our making and those we discover, sooner or later, to have existed all along or have been built surreptitiously during moments of complacency. What of these, though?

I am thinking of more immediate and horrific forms of besieging. The conditions that warrant the use of the word ‘hostage,’ the particularly horrifying and pernicious besiegement of the here and now.

There is the Hamas attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,300 people followed by 100-150 people being taken hostage. That’s got a lot of play and not only on account of the shocking and unexpected way in which the attack was executed. Then came what is called ‘retaliation.’ And so I amended a line from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Let me think): ’from which window flew the first arrow, dipped in blood?’

Ah, the first arrow, dripped in blood no less, implies antecedents. How far back in history do you want to go, though?

Should we believe that history began on October 7, 2023, and that the relevant arrowheads were bloodless? A wanton act of terrorism then that requires firm and uncompromising response on perpetrators, those they claim to represent and those among whom they’ve taken refuge even to the extent of firing white phosphorus, dropping bombs, bulldozing schools, hospitals and homes, and treating each and every Palestinian as a legitimate target?

Whether arrows needed to be shot notwithstanding, the arrowheads were not only dipped in blood but in fact layers and layers of blood. And if you want a slice of that bloody history, if you want to know who had voice and who was required to and forced to remain silent, if you want to know the birthplace of militancy, nay terrorism, we could travel back in time.

We would then encounter Haganah, a Jewish militant group that helped the chosen people evict residents and build settlements for 14 years before Palestinians decided to ‘go political’ in 1935. Britain’s White Paper on the subject of terrorism tabled in 1946 mentioned two ‘extremist Jewish organisations,’ Haganah and Irgun. No PLP, no Hamas or any organisation of their ilk. Didn't end in 1946, simply put.

The history of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel could in fact be written in terms of the territories annexed. Cartographers and historians could use quills dipped in blood as recording instruments. And in all that writing and all that mapping, one thing stands out: no one asked the Palestinians, they were not allowed 'in the rooms where it happened' and are kept out still.

If the lands were peopled by many groups, Jewish and Arab included, boundaries were marked and moved not as retaliation and security but simply expansion of real estate. Settlements were established, settlers were armed and they were protected for good measure by a military apparatus that operated with impunity.

If there is anyone who is not willing to talk about history, pick up arrowheads, check for bloodstains and conduct DNA tests just to make sure, that’s a self-incarceration of minds and hearts. If such there breathes, the breath itself is marked by complicity. Alright, perhaps fear, but what fear in safe locations with no risks at all compared to the terror of living in a landscape where children being orphaned and parents seeing their children dying before their very eyes where every breath taken could be the last?

Let us retire history and the narrative of arrows.

Millions have been asked to leave their homes with an ‘or else!’ that is screamed out in the form of low-flying aircrafts carrying bombs and releasing them (according the Israel, some 6,000 in six days). The people in Gaza are under siege. The people in the West Bank too.

Wait. Wait!

None of this is new. The people of Palestine have been under siege of one kind or another and forced to suffer deprivations which in another context, another country or another time, may have not required any second thought before releasing a full-throated cry, ‘Genocide!’ Cutting off water and electricity, prevention of movement, saturation of areas with the military so that even a journey of a few miles would take hours, white phosphorus, bombs, bullets, bullying, harassment at innumerable checkpoints — no, such was Gaza before October 7, 2023.
But today, ladies and gentlemen, that’s a word to think about. Today. If we talk of arrows, windows and blood, pick a date and look away, who are we then?

Faiz asks:

At what exact moment

were the trees drained of blood
so when the veins snapped,
nothing could be saved?

And we should answer, softly:

Ah! If only we had time to ponder
if only dusk came straddled by day and night
but there are no trees now
snapped veins too buried in the rubble of amnesia;
heartbeats wander in a land and among people ghosted
and a drop of blood murmurs:

15 October 2023

The truly besieged

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