Individual Medium Post #2
Projects of oppression all throughout history often adopt very distinctive strategies to accomplish their goals. These projects could include colonization, wars, racism, subjugation of minorities, etc. However, I believe that one element shared between all these projects is the victims’ attempt to resist oppression by creating a self-identity and producing cultural productions. In response and acknowledgment of the power that these cultural productions have, the oppressors attempt to suppress them.
Cultural productions could take forms in many different ways such as language, literature, art, music, etc. Language, specifically, has been a very important element that many groups of oppressors have attempted to suppress throughout history. An example of this is the Japanese attempt to suppress Okinawans’ language style. Another example mentioned by another classmate is Hong Kong’s insistence on using the traditional Chinese character instead of adhering to the Communist party’s simple characters.
Even beyond the far east, there are many examples of suppressed language. In America, slave owners often punished slaves who spoke in their native African languages. In America today, there is a lot of wariness and stigma against the Arabic language when spoken in public spaces since it’s considered a threat and a sign of danger. During the pandemic, there were a lot of similar xenophobic attitudes towards East Asian languages as well.
During Britain’s colonization of Egypt, Edward Said writes about his experience with the suppression of his native Arabic language under the colonized education system in Egypt:
“The moment one became a student at Victoria College, one was given the student handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life — the kind of uniform we were to wear, what equipment was needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, bus schedules, and so on. But the school’s first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of the handbook, read:“English is the language of the school; students caught speaking any other language will be punished.” Yet, there were no native speakers of English among the students. Whereas the masters were all British, we were a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, each of whom had a native language that the school had explicitly outlawed. Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic — many spoke Arabic and French — and so we were able to take refuge in a common language, in defiance of what we perceived as an unjust colonial structure.”
By “taking refuge in a common language”, I believe oppressed communities find both a sense of self-identification and belonging, as well as a sense of resistance against their oppressors.
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Another important element of cultural production is that it conveys and expresses so much of the human experiences and emotions under struggle without the need to elaborate on the political background of those stories. (One of my classmates, Angela Ouyang, elaborates on this point a lot in her individual post.) For the people outside the communities of the oppressed, it is very difficult to understand or deeply sympathize with the human lives. We hear the political aspect from what we see in the media or what we read in history books, but it is the art, the literature, and the music that remind us of the actual human lives beyond politics. Cultural productions decontextualize the stories of the people and instead, they convey raw human emotions and experiences.
In the context of what’s happening today in the world and the media, I feel like it is important to include these 2 Palestinian poems that are good examples of cultural productions used by Palestinians over the years as a form of resistance against oppressors.
In Jerusalem
TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy … ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die.
(‘is from dimly lit stone that wars flare up?’: stones are an important symbol in the Palestinian struggle. Kids in Jerusalem use rocks to resist the attacks by the Israeli military, and from that resistance, a new form of wars flares up. A war of stones vs guns)
F*ck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
BY NOOR HINDI
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.
