No requiems for the Scandal of the Century

 

There’s an old song probably penned by Gamini Haththotuwegama, widely recognised as the Father of Street-Theatre in Sri Lanka, which speaks of the violence associated with the insurrection of 1971. That song was probably more appropriate for the ‘bheeshanaya’ of the late eighties. Looking back, the two insurrections were quite distinct from one another and hindsight makes us wonder who the ‘rebels’ were fighting for. For real.  

The song had this line: 'amu amuve goda gaehuva, vala nodamaa pilissuva, aesipiya nohela oba dutuva, mama dutuvaa…daena daena apa atharin nopeni giyaa.’ So, the translation: ‘[they] were piled up alive (raw), weren’t cremated but buried..you saw and so did I…and with our full knowledge they disappeared.’

This song came to me as I was seeking some solace from Gabriel José García Márquez. As often happens in moments of despair, I seek out my favourite writers. Sometimes it’s Márquez, sometimes Pablo Neruda. Sometimes, Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Nazim Hikmet.

Sometimes just a random page in a random book answers the unanswerable, but I wasn’t looking for an answer. I had just read a BBC report where the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee’ had suggested that ‘Muslim countries’ (their quote) should give up some of their land to create a future Palestinian state.  He said, also, that ‘maybe, if there is such a desire for the Palestinian state, there would be someone who would say, we’d like to host it.’

Sounded like a requiem. In his thinking, there’s no Palestinian state (true, technically) and those who want a state for Palestinians should facilitate a mass exodus and generously offer real estate to those forced out of their homes, their homeland. That kind of logic could have been used by those who supported Zionism back in the day to, say, carve out a Jewish enclave somewhere in the USA.

Things don’t happen that way. Politics inform the cartographer. Countries are born, they decay and they die. Boundaries are made and erased and redrawn. That’s the history of the world.

Anyway, Huckabee made me think of a collection of essays by Márquez titled ‘THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY and Other Writings.’ For me, at least, the massacre of Palestinians by Isreal forces with the unabashed and absolute support of the US and her allies in Europe and other parts of THAT empire which includes, at least, Australia, is THE scandal of this century. So far. The world, or rather the hegemonic media houses of the world, have seen and looked the other way while people were buried alive in their thousands.

Among those buried are infants, pregnant women, the sick, elderly and dying. Among them are UN workers and doctors whose only objective was to respond to a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportion.

They were slaughtered in cold blood. And the excuse has been ‘Isreal has the right to defend her existence.’

If defending existence is the rule of thumb then every single response to Zionist aggression over many decades, whatever the form that response took, terrorism included, is justified.

But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Or is it? The logic of the Zionists and their vocal apologists in fact validate any and all acts of violence because all the violent have to say is ‘we are defending our right to exist.’ Subjectivities explode, friends.  And people die. In their thousands. Sorry, they don’t die, they are butchered. And there’s no butchery in this century that comes anywhere close to what happens in the hell that Israel has turned Occupied Palestine into.  

Márquez, in a speech titled ‘The beloved though distant homeland,’ delivered in Medellín, Colombia, in 2003, quotes Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: ‘All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.’

Cervantes wasn’t talking of Colombia, but Márquez says it applies to his country.

He explains thus.

‘Last year [that is, in 2002] close to 400,000 Colombians had to flee their houses and land because of the violence, as almost 3 million others had already done for the same reason over the previous half-century.’

Cervantes (and Márquez) could have been talking about Palestine.

But Márquez believes that ‘we still have a deeper country to discover in the midst of disaster: a secret Colombia that no longer fits in the moulds we had forged for ourselves with our historical follies.’

‘A secret Palestine’ also works. But Márquez is generous and self-effacing. The ‘forging’ he speaks of was not the product of collective decision-making. There was no unanimous vote on measures that turned Occupied Palestine into the hell it has become. There were deliberate decisions. Genocide was an objective. It still is. Huckabee would know, for that’s the history of his country as well.  

There are, however, nations we can re-imagine and populate. Gentler ones. Gamini Haththotuwega knew this. And that’s why the song has these lines as well:

‘Unge leyin, dadi mau-piya gunayen, game godin sidaadiyen, kadaagena ena haema paeththen, ranchu gaesee enavaa, satan vadee enavaa.’

(From their blood, from the timbre of motherhood and fatherhood, from village and city, breaking through from all sides, as a multitude, they [will] arrive fighting, again and again.’)

We could write a requiem for the scandal of this century.

Later, perhaps. For, like W H Auden said in his celebrated poem on the Spanish Civil War, ‘today, the struggle.’ The struggle for a country that was, is and will be. Palestine. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title ‘The Recurrent Thursday’]