Conversation IV: Permission to witness – by Libby King
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Conversation III
When I felt she was open enough to hear, I told her everything. They are obsessed with olive oil and soap and oranges, I wrote. Coffee rituals / Tea rituals / Niche cheeses from specific villages / Old walls / Ancient wells / Markets. Oh friend, I wrote. The markets! / Farmers, I said. / And artisans / They are obsessed with spices.
I didn’t mention the little herbal hole in the wall in the Old Market in Nablus on the West Bank where a man with grey stubble and a balding head cheekily reassured my father that if impotency was an issue he had a herbal mixture to deal with that.
I didn’t tell her about the walls of jars filled with colourful dried flowers and roots, nor of the counter that he stood behind with more dried herbs arranged under glass, some whole and some ground.
I didn’t tell her of the sensory experience, of all of us in that little space, and I didn’t tell her of the smells that constantly came and went as we walked around the market – fresh ground cumin, fresh bread, dishwashing soap, donkey dung.
I didn’t tell her that my father laughed and laughed, nor that the shopkeeper grinned knowingly back and then went on to describe the other remedies he could offer.
I didn’t mention that he spoke Arabic and we spoke English, nor of how communicating ailments of the body can be easy across languages.
Outer reaches of the galaxy
You need to understand that I grew up in the outer reaches of the galaxy, the remotest possible colonial outpost where fragments of diversity were ground to red dust. A place where the trucks for resource extraction rolled and where we were surrounded by places named after the minerals that were mined and where the end of the long drive home was marked by the steelworks appearing as a silhouette on the horizon.
If it was a movie, we were one planet back from the last planet. The tail end of the comet.
For breakfast we ate boxed cereal – or porridge on a good day – and lunch was slipped between slices of bread that came packaged in plastic bags with a shelf life. When a colleague of my father’s visited from Sarawak, he was devastated and truly depressed by the food we could offer. His very being, it seemed, craved flavour, and we were so sad to tell him that we had no flavour to give. Ours was a monoculture; we didn’t even know what we didn’t have. We brought things measurable by currency and power, not by diversity or complexity.
Conversation III (cont)
Breakfast is fresh, I said. Fresh bread and fresh hummus made right there on the street with a mortar and pestle. I didn’t tell her that the hummus-maker’s hands moved so fast when he hammered those chickpeas that I hardly believed it was real.
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is at the crossroads of continents. This is why there are lines on the keffiyeh – trade routes to Europe, to China, to the Balkans, to Africa.
I didn’t tell my friend about the falafel my father bought me outside the Damascus Gate, just him and me, of its unbelievable crispiness, nor of the vendor with his covered cart displaying enormous bowls of salads, who checked with me if I wanted this or that, nor of how I’ve never had a falafel that good since.
Conversation II
‘I was seven when I woke in front of a bowl of gazpacho in Jerusalem,’ I said.
I didn’t say that it was a literal waking from jetlag and a metaphoric waking to the world. How while my mother and father were distracted by polite conversation my siblings and I looked at each other across the table in silent shock. I didn’t say how we each knew what the other was thinking, because there was only one thing a rational person could think: flavour.
Olive harvest
During the olive harvest on the West Bank, pickers have codes and signals. There are vigilantes here, men who carry machine guns and operate outside the law. These men can kill the olive harvesters with impunity. If an olive harvester sees one of these men, they whistle and the other olive harvesters duck and hide.
If it were a movie, it would be a dystopian one. Picking olives is dangerous, you could get yourself shot.
Keffiyeh
The tip of Yasser Arafat’s keffiyeh was always arranged in such a pointy way, don’t you think? When I watched a video of him saying ‘We are fed up and treated like rats’ I couldn’t take my eyes off that tip at the front of his keffiyeh.
Tip
If you don’t want to be compared to war criminals, take care not to call people ‘human animals.’
Impunity I
Impunity implies a lack of consequences. The men with machine guns who threaten the olive harvesters have impunity. They would never face a court or anything for shooting a human animal in the heart or the leg. I learned about the warning whistles of the olive harvesters because one got shot. He got himself killed. That made small-town news.
Conversation II (cont)
I told her about the time that there was a curfew and we stood out on a balcony – two white adults with three blonde children – and observed men with machine guns on the street below. We looked at these men as curiosities and they looked up at us with a seemingly similar sentiment. It was summer, early evening just after sunset, and pleasantly warm. But from inside the room behind us came frantic whispers: Come inside! Come inside! I turned to see Rita[1] crawling on the floor inside the house, desperately anxious.
Rita and her family were very sophisticated people, far more sophisticated than my family. They reminded me of my paternal Grandmother with their style and the way they held themselves, so I was surprised to see her crawling on the floor.
Later over dinner, I learned that it was common knowledge that one crawls when there are men with machine guns outside.
But when we were still on the balcony and Rita was still crawling and whispering at the open door, I remember hearing her speak to her husband and the awareness that came over them that the soldiers were looking at us with curiosity and not shouting at us with disdain or pointing their weapons at us with threats. It wasn’t the racism that interested them, it was learning how the rules were applied that got them talking because at that moment, when we stood on the balcony with impunity, they learned that staying inside wasn’t a universally applied rule.
Rita laughed with relief, right there on all fours in the open doorway, when she realised our out-of-town ignorance wasn’t going to get us killed.
Witness I
Some things stick with you.
What sticks with me is the news of the death of the head of the committee that documents crimes in Gaza. When there is no justice, when it doesn’t matter why or how you get yourself killed or shot or arrested, truth is everything.
Truth says: we know what you did. Truth says: we saw you. Truth hangs like a knife over the neck of offenders.
Witnesses are very bad for impunity. Criminals have to worry about that. I remember the Nazi guard who was extradited to face trial when he was over 90 years old. His photo was all over the television and the newspapers.
That committee was a witness, a courtroom corroborator for a future reckoning; that man’s death was mentioned on the local television stations because of the truth he held in his head and all the files he meticulously collected and kept track of.
Truth cannot be taken. Palestinians don’t have the rule of law, they can’t expect their children to be treated with fairness or their elders to be treated with dignity or their lives to be treated as valuable.
This is why calling Palestinians liars is so strange. Palestinians don’t lie about their oppression, they take meticulous notes, and when the man who looks after those notes and pulls them out when someone needs them dies – well, that’s news.
Conversation I
When I think about how the personhood of Palestinians is contested, I always think about religion – about how religious co-existence is as important to Palestinian culture as olive oil soap. But I’d have to speak gently before telling you that. I’d have to clear all obstacles from the way, would have to brush the propaganda aside without you seeing that I was brushing propaganda aside. And even then, you’d be sceptical.
In our first conversation, before she was ready to hear everything, I told my friend about how religious tolerance was very important to Palestinian culture: ‘I can’t imagine how upsetting it would be to have others spread lies about something so fundamental, something so well-known and understood,’ I said. I wanted to say that a Holy War against Palestinians is an oxymoron, but it was too early for that.
‘Are they?’ she said with the same inflection she used when I’d told her earlier that the three months I’d spent on the West Bank as a child were pure magic.
‘Was it?’ she’d said, sceptical, unable to reconcile this sentiment with what she’d heard on the news.
‘It’s an ancient Indigenous culture in the middle of the world and I come from a white hegemonic monoculture on the outer reaches of the resource-extracting colonised galaxy,’ I said. ‘Of course it was magical.’
Conversation V
Some time later she wrote a text: ‘South Africa is on a path towards healing their racist past, but Australia isn’t on a similar path.’ She was talking about what had happened some months before in The Voice referendum. ‘Yes, it’s surreal to see Australia’s politicians campaign for Indigenous people one minute and then support another colonisation a few months later,’ I said. ‘Oh, I didn’t see this as being about colonialism,’ she wrote, ‘but of course!’ I suggested she look up the Nakba and a few hours later she texted, ‘Oh!’
Impunity II
The thing is that they don’t hide their lies, they just push through it, just like they don’t hide the impunity they give the men with the machine guns who stalk the olive groves.
Witness II
Permission to witness is passed around like a secret. Witnesses are their greatest fear, so they scare you into not looking.
Over dinner a friend told of how he was given permission to witness as a teenager when working as a welder. A colleague had told him it’s ok to criticise any country in the world, that behind the carefully erected façade there is something to see.
Before the internet, permission to witness was passed around person-to-person like a secret: It’s ok to criticise any country in the world. Now permission to witness is all over TikTok and Pelosi says it’s Russians or Chinese propaganda; Palestinian humanity, she thinks, is anything but rational.
‘You will be called horrible names,’ he said and before he’d finished the words another friend cut him off and said: ‘I know!’ It was as though the fear of it was bouncing around inside her, as though fear had previously sewn her mouth closed.
And that made me think of how frightening it would be to be an olive harvester, always at risk of getting yourself shot, and how upsetting it would be to be called a religious bigot from a time before your parents even fell in love.
Conversation I (cont)
Earlier, she said something disparaging about Hamas, as though it was something that had to be done: the price of entry, a stamp on the wrist, opening your bag for inspection to make sure you’re not bringing water through the gates.
No going back
I need you to understand that there is no returning as a Palestinian.
You can visit on another passport – a USA passport or Australian passport, for example. Then you can bypass the checkpoints and you can take videos of the brick walls of your family home and the grape vines and send the videos to your family in the West Bank or in Gaza with your phone and they might look at the rug in the room where they sit, the same rug that used to sit on the floor of that house and that now rests in their temporary home in the refugee camp. Or maybe the rug is only in their memory or the memory of their mother or grandmother. And maybe your uncle and your grandfather in the West Bank will complain about phones as they try to zoom in on the courtyard to see what has changed because they are old and it’s hard to keep up with technology.
First Page
When I think of the hopelessness of this witnessing, I think about that statue at Colebrook that honours Aboriginal mothers who had their babies taken; the hopelessness, the visits to Parliamentarians and the police and social workers; the way there is no intervention that leads to justice, no intervention that can bring your child back to you.
I think of how targeting children is on the first page of the coloniser’s handbook: the Stolen Generation, residential schools, snipers shooting children in the head. I think of how children in Israeli custody are denied access to lawyers and parents and how courts have a conviction rate of 99.74%.
And how it feels like the Terms of Reference for a Reconciliation Commission are being written at the same time the crimes are committed.
I think about how one day you’re harvesting olives then your child is gone and all you can do is go to the head of the Committee that documents crimes and he writes down details in a book or maybe an Excel spreadsheet: name, place, age, circumstances. He might shake his head and he might say he’s terribly sorry. And he might say ‘we will get justice’ as he enters the details into his files, even though you both know that’s not true. He might ask if you have pictures of the crime where your child was taken and when you go to share a video or a photograph of the man with the machine gun, he might complain as he tries to upload the picture into his files. ‘I hate these things,’ he might mutter, because he is old and it’s hard to keep up with technology.
Witness III
With the internet we are like infants in a crib, aware there is trouble but unable to act. Today: thirty people blindfolded, restrained, shot. Last week: a dozen babies in incubators left to rot. Yesterday: executions in hospitals. Today: a child shot walking hand-in-hand with their mother.
We cry and fuss. But the modern world is one-way: neither our televisions nor our computers hear us and, if our phones do, it is to pass our conversations to advertisers or run our grief through surveillance software to mark our hatred of war crimes as suspicious.
With or without baking powder?
A friend once told me Succession wasn’t believable: ‘No one is as bad as that,’ he said. And I thought about how irrational the coloniser mindset is for it to think white people hazing each other in a corporate landscape is unbelievable, but brown people beheading and baking babies en masse is believable enough to put on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
It seems there is never enough to convince coloniser cultures that Europeans meandering through olive groves with machine guns looking for olive harvesters actually exist. We don’t see them. We don’t see ourselves. We see only a line of defence between us and decapitated babies.
The olive harvester walked into the gun. The olive harvester threatened the man with the gun. The olive harvester is a religious bigot. The olive harvesters don’t exist. Olive harvests have no future in this olive grove. Olive harvesters should face reality.
Monastic history
It’s such a horrific thing, to hate someone for their religion, isn’t it? I may have grown up in the weeds of a culture that hated people for the colour of their skin and their 60,000-year-old languages and their connections to the ancient and their extraordinary minds and communities, but one thing I was taught was that you don’t hate people for their religion.
I don’t tell my friend that Gaza is where some of the earliest Christian monastic traditions started.
But we do talk about how the USA refused to allow Jewish refugees to land.
We talk about how the Holocaust was a European project.
We talk about how blaming Palestinians for European sins and calling Palestinians the monster to deflect from the real monster is a long-standing white tradition. We want to laugh. Stop ourselves. Then try to laugh, again.
Witness IV
In Arabic there is a word for a person who dies in the act of witnessing injustice.
Labouring I
We don’t talk about labouring, how if it were a television show it would be something brutal and Victorian – The Forsyte Saga or Downton Abbey.
Conversation III
Weaving! I wrote. I added the exclamation mark because it was important and I was remiss to have forgotten earlier.
‘I saw a video of an Israeli soldier carrying a handwoven rug away from a house in Gaza,’ I said.
I didn’t say that I wondered about the story of that rug. I wondered who made it and whether it was gifted at a wedding or purchased for comfort and coziness. I didn’t tell her that I wondered whether it had travelled to Gaza during the Nakba or whether it came from a house that still stood, out beyond the barbed wire and walls.
Labouring II
But look, I’m labouring the point. I’m humanising Palestinians too much. I’m as obsessed with Palestine as Palestinians are with olive oil, I know.
It’s because I was seven.
It’s because of the gazpacho in Jerusalem.
It’s because the man who wrapped the olive oil soap in Nablus had hands faster than the roadrunner.
It’s because of the ice cream in Ramallah. If you’d eaten ice cream in Ramallah, I think it would be easier to understand. I really do.
If you had eaten ice cream in Ramallah it would be easier to understand how it’s strange to talk about a culture and to have to remind your listener that you are talking about actual human people.
Conversation IV
We talk about being white children in white colonial cultures. We talk about permission: permission to see, permission to witness, permission to believe the alarm of the olive harvester’s whistle.
Conversation I (cont)
We talked about this and that – her new dog, the difference between the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian strategies for stuffing zucchini. I was bringing her in slow. ‘I was seven when I ate maftoola and knafa in Gaza,’ I said. ‘The couscous was fresh,’ I said.
I stopped for a moment and remembered the face of the woman who rolled the couscous. How she sat on the floor and laughed and smiled as she mimed rolling flour between her hands. I remembered how she seemed older than anyone I’d ever met and how, unlike everyone else, she wore a long robe and a headscarf of a soft pastel. I remembered how so many people lived in such a small house, and the colourful sheets that separated the family that lived in this room from the family that lived in that hallway. I remembered us sitting on the floor with the food in the centre, eating with our hands. How there was chicken for the occasion and how my parents discussed this generosity later as we drove back to Nablus, a place most who live in Gaza cannot visit.
And how, again, flavour made my siblings and I speechless. ‘I’ve found a place that makes something almost like it,’ my brother said of knafa just days before he passed and my sister and I looked at him like he was telling us where to find gold.
But I didn’t tell her any of that. ▼
[1] Not her real name.
Image: Jill Granberg - Flickr
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