There are a couple of interesting articles in today’s Guardian. One is a tribute to Edward Said penned by Tom Paulin; the other is Marina Warner’s article on optical paradoxes.
Paulin also draws our attention to a conference on Said, featuring a number of prominent speakers and information about which can be found here.
An edited version of John Berger's article "A Moment in Ramalah" appears here:
Certain trees - particularly the mulberries and medlars - still tell the story of how long ago, in another life, before the nakba, Ramallah was, for the well-off, a town of leisure and ease, a place to retreat to from nearby Jerusalem during the hot summers, a resort. The nakba refers to the 'catastrophe' of 1948 when ten thousand Palestinians were killed and 700,000 were forced to leave their country. Long ago, newly married couples planted roses in Ramallah gardens as an augury for their future life together. The alluvial soil suited the roses. Today there is not a wall in the town centre of Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority, which is not covered with photographs of the dead, taken when they were alive, and now reprinted as small posters
“Three stories from the walls.
Husni al-Nayjar, 14 years old. He worked helping his father who was a welder. While flinging stones, he was shot dead with a bullet to the head. In his photo he gazes calmly and unwaveringly into the middle distance.
Abdelhamid Kharti, 34 years old. Painter and writer. When young, he had trained as a nurse. He volunteered to join a medical emergency unit for rescuing and taking care of the wounded. His corpse was found near a checkpoint, after a night when there had been no confrontations. His fingers had been cut off. A thumb was hanging loose. An arm, a hand and his jaw were broken. There were twenty bullets in his body.
Muhammad al-Durra, 12 years old, lived in the Breij Camp. He was returning home with his father across the Netzarin checkpoint in Gaza and they were ordered to get out of their vehicle. Soldiers were already shooting. The two of them took immediate cover behind a cement wall. The father waved to show they were there and was shot in the hand. A little later Muhammad was shot in the foot. The father now shielded his son with his own body. More bullets hit both, and the boy was killed. Doctors removed eight bullets from the father's body, but he has been paralysed as a consequence of the wounds and is unable to work. Because the incident happened to be filmed, the story is told and retold across the world.”
Some will immediately respond: "Who can verify these stories?" The fact that we cannot verify them (because those who would verify such stories are not granted legitimacy, because the ‘legitimate’ scribes will not grant them verification), that official accounts have no interest in their verification or even registration, that History, written by the victors, does not feel answerable to such stories and can let them spill into oblivion with impunity, that even to draw attention to such stories is met by accusations of unacceptable complicities, that one is re-directed to more 'worthy' items and suddenly deafened by ideologues screaming for 'context'- all this is of course precisely the problem.