Zones of Contention: After The Green Line. 8 February – 3 May 2015. The Bob & Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In March2015, I delivered an invited “Point of View Talk” at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum on Zones of Contention: After the Green Line, an exhibit of works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, including a piece by Belgian Francis Alÿs, from which the exhibit draws its title.The museum’s Point of View Talks are intended to “amplify aspects of an exhibition through the perspectives of scholars from diverse fields.” My own particular point of view was shaped by two important factors: my identity as a Palestinian and my vocation as a teacher and writer. To me, these two elements are inseparable—they complement each other, inform each other, feed and bleed into each other; many times, they grate against each other, conflict, do bloody battle. I am at my personal best, however, when these two selves hold each other accountable.
As a Palestinian, I want to be an activist. I want to be blunt and forceful. I want what I say, how I say it, and what I mean to brook no confusion, suffer no interpretation, excuse no ambiguity. As a teacher and writer, however, I want to dwell, and make others dwell, in ambiguity, hand over agency to my students and to my readers, offer my craft at the altar of their vision, their experience. I want to facilitate, not dictate, to show you so that you can tell me. But as a Palestinian, I want to tell you how it is and what you need to do about it. Both of these impulses effect, hopefully, a kind of transformation. So when I experienced this exhibit, it was both as a Palestinian and as a teacher and artist.
There were times, at this exhibit, when these two selves concurred. For example, Yael Bartana’s A Declaration didn’t sit easily with either one. Clearly, A Declaration is, among other things, critical of the violence of the Israeli state. After all, it makes a point of, indeed dramatizes, replacing the symbol of the nation, the Israeli flag, with an olive tree, a powerful symbol for peace and the uprooted Palestine, both literally and figuratively. But I struggled with the film’s lack of awareness of the freedom with which an Israeli can get on a boat, paddle out to Andromeda’s Rock, and remove the Israeli flag with such ease, such self-assurance, such security. (Do note, however, how very gingerly he handles it, rolling it with excruciating care to be placed in the boat). A Palestinian would not have been allowed to perform such an act. He or she would have been most likely killed on the spot. The deep imbalance of power that is at the root of the Palestinian condition vexes me as a Palestinian. The film’s failure to acknowledge it vexes me as an artist. The piece seemed to be blissfully unaware of this asymmetry; there was not the necessary self-reflectiveness and self-consciousness that a piece funded and sanctioned by state agencies—the same state whose flag was being replaced—ought to have.
[Still image from Yael Bartana, "A Declaration" (2006). Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and
Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Image provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum.]
As a Palestinian, I frequently think about bodies being prohibited, admonished, imprisoned, bordered, rejected, victimized, vilified, dehumanized—all the injustices that happen to Palestinian bodies in the zones of contention. Hence, I am especially fascinated by the idea of posing and sneaking, by how the proscribed body, in negotiating these injustices, pretends to be other things, masquerades as other things—intentionally, forcefully, forcibly, unknowingly.
In the exhibit, the most obvious examples of this are Dor Guez’s filmed interview “Sa(Mira)” and Sharif Waked’s film “Bath Time.” Samira, the young Arab woman waitress interviewed in Guez’s film, is struggling with being asked by the restaurant’s manager to “pose” as a Jewish Israeli after customers complain about her being an Arab. The giveaway is her name, so she is asked to change it from the very obviously Arab “Samira” to the more Jewish “Sima,” though they finally settle on the compromise of “Mira.” Ironically, Samira has already been “posing,” or rather has been “posed,” by her inevitable condition. The way she looks, the way she speaks, allow her to “pass” as a European Jew, but only for so long. She recounts how angry the boys interested in dating her become when they find out who she really is: “How come you are an Arab? You deceived us!” “If you weren’t Arab I would have gone out with you.” Of course, Samira is not trying to deceive anybody. She is so humiliated by the request to change her name that she ultimately decides to quit her job. But while Samira doesn’t want to sneak or pose and wants to be accepted on her own terms (“I don’t want to change my name. It’s part of who I am”), she is clearly a creature of the in-between in a way that most Diaspora Palestinians cannot even fathom, let alone relate to. Identifying both as Arab and as Israeli, proud of her Arab name but wanting so desperately to be accepted by Israeli society, she is caught in the middle.
Sharif Waked’s “Bath Time” is shown, appropriately, on a screen just on the other side of the wall where Samira continually tells us her story. Like her, the creature of “Bath Time,” a donkey painted as zebra (like those purportedly painted for the Gaza zoo when it lost its zebras to Israeli shelling) is also perpetually stuck in a liminal state, a state of in-betweenness. Waked’s video is on a loop of a portion of the donkey’s bath time; we never see the donkey as a fully realized zebra, nor the zebra fully unmasked as a donkey. This donkey, too, is posing—or rather, like Samira, is “posed” by others (for what does a donkey know about posing, and what does Samira have to do with the decades of history that have forced her into this critical moment of having to choose between posing and not posing?). They are both caught in the middle of deeply racist systems and structures. The Arab body, like the donkey of “Bath Time,” is forced to pretend, to become something else, something “better,” to be able to survive. “What’s the worst that can happen to me?” asks Samira, seemingly thinking that not getting a job or an apartment could be the worst. Neither she nor the donkey seems to realize the fatal weight of the “othered” body.
[Still image from Sharif Waked, "Bath Time" (2012). Courtesy of the artist. Image provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum.]
Yael Bartana’s other exhibited work, “The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection,” also epitomizes this sneaking and blurring of identity. German Jewish photojournalists Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld documented the settlement of Jewish youth in 1930 and 1940s Palestine. Bartana re-stages select images from their vast collection “using young Arabs and Arab Jews, who are currently residing in Israel.” The caption at the exhibit also tells us that the “youths whose religious or ethnic affiliations are not identified…express a shared hope for a better future.” To me, however, the inability to distinguish one from the other, the “Arab” from the “Jew,” illustrates starkly the problematic ways in which “racial lines” have been politically and artificially drawn, thus opening up the possibility of one sneaking, posing, as the other.
Yet while Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Arabs might be so intimately connected that we can, on the face of it, confuse them with each other, we must always remember that right now, even though they might be “copies” of each other, one is still a “negative” copy of the other. These copies, these mirror images, are highly asymmetrical since the Palestinian is often powerless, without privilege. This is blatantly, but unconsciously, illustrated in Bartana’s “A Declaration.” The man in the boat does not need to sneak, to lie low in his vessel. He can row it proudly, in plain view and highly visible, get up on that rock in his masculine bulkiness, take off his shirt, and remove the Israeli flag. For the Palestinian, in-betweenness is a mode of survival. Only the privileged and powerful can afford to pose, like those in the “Sonnenfeld Collection,” as an emotional gesture, highly important though it may be, of solidarity.
Nira Pereg’s “Sabbath,” which “documents the closing down of the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem on the eve of the Sabbath” by neighborhood residents who use metal street dividers, leaves us with the possibility of “sneaking” across the rickety barriers. Though we never see this sneaking, it seems to be a distinct, almost inevitable, possibility. The film hints at it in the shots of cars approaching the easily moveable roadblocks. The desire to be on this side and not that side could easily motivate someone to get out of his or her car, when no one is watching, move the barrier, drive the car through, and then move the divider back.
All of the exhibit’s references to sneaking and posing suggest two important things. The first is that these highly dangerous, volatile, and asymmetrical borders, barriers, and dividers are not impenetrable to the powerless. The second is that the nature of the conflict imposes on the powerless certain ways in which they can deal with such borders, negotiate them, survive them—for example, by sneaking through or posing as somebody or something else. These methods include great risk to the Palestinian body, where the mask is an incredibly fragile thing.