Posts Tagged ‘conflict’
On Palestine, settler colonialism, humanism, and the universe
I was always a bookish kid so it wasn’t surprising that my mother, who very much encouraged me in this, bought me a big book to read one Christmas, when I was ten or eleven years old. I knew it was my mum, she was the one who encouraged all that, packing the house with books and getting us, my two older siblings and I, out to the library in the next suburb every fortnight or so.
This book, though, has a special place in my memory, though I can’t recall the precise title or the author, and the book itself sadly disappeared from my belongings, along with almost everything else, a lifetime ago. It was a history of the ‘American West’, and it included two chapters, titled something like ‘Blood in the mountains’ and ‘Blood on the prairie’. The emotional impact of these chapters on me was profound, and lasting. Nowadays we describe this ‘land-clearing’, or more accurately ‘people-clearing’, process euphemistically as settler colonialism, and of course it happened here in Australia. The story is generally told this way – ‘we came, we saw, we conquered, and we improved the lot of the vanquished, or at least of those who survived’, though I’m pretty sure that the author of the book I read presented no such silver lining, to his credit.
All of the above is preliminary to a reflection on Israel-Palestine, another version of settler colonialism, which has been ongoing, really since the 19th century. But in more recent times we’ve wised up a little to the injustice of it all, and we can’t use the excuse that United Staters and Australians have used – that it was all in the past, that we know better now than to call indigenous peoples ‘savages’. We even like to have their artwork on our walls.
So I can be holier than thou about the Palestinian situation?
Actually, it’s simpler than that. It’s just like that old book about the West, it’s about siding with the victims. I also like to use the ‘no free will’ argument – we didn’t get to choose the culture or ethnicity we were born into. Or the species, for that matter. Would I have preferred to be a bonobo? Not really… but then, there’s the sex…
The fact is, being born Palestinian in the contested region of Palestine-Israel in the 20th or 21st century is one piece of bad luck among many (Rohingyas in Burma, Congolese under Leopold II’s ‘Free State’, Chinese under Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, Ukrainians under Stalin and his Holodomor). Then again, luck isn’t the word – it’s about brutality, selfishness, indifference to suffering, all the negative elements of humanity.
But now, more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, with global communications prying into every corner of the globe, we can’t so easily hide the cruelty, the arrogance, the blatant injustice of what the perpetrators avoid describing as settler colonialism, that quaint descriptor.
I’m writing this because, due to the choice, by a reading group I’m a member of, of a novel by an Australian author of Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was recently ‘disinvited’ to Adelaide Writers’ Week, probably the nation’s premier writers’ festival, for reasons unknown to me. This action prompted a boycott by so many other writers that the event had to be cancelled, an unprecedented situation in the event’s history, as far as I’m aware. I should say that a terroristic attack in the area of Bondi Beach in December last year (2025), carried out by members of an anti-semitic organisation called Islamic State, in which 15 people were killed, appears to have influenced the Writers’ Week Committee’s decision.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline, told a story of young Palestinian-Australian intellectuals struggling to get the message of the plight of their people heard by the media and academia in Australia. As an ‘oldie’, I found all the talk about Whatsapp, Insta Tiles, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, flipbooks, app interfaces and such to be exasperating. I found the Moslem or Arabic cultural and religious references – Allahu Akbar, Bismallah, Salafi, Wallahi, intifada, iftar, koshari, fajr and so on – a little more interesting, but, insofar as they’re religious, not so much. Frankly, I find all religious beliefs to be just plain silly, especially given what we now know of our universe and our evolutionary history, though I make some effort to recognise that they’re bound up with heavy cultural identity and such. I’m just glad, or lucky, not to have been brought up in such a heavy culture. No free will and all that.
Having said that, the novel has refocused my attention on the Israel-Palestine horror-show, and that above-mentioned term, ‘settler colonialism’. The first book I read on the issue was The Case for Palestine, by an Australian lawyer, Paul Heywood-Smith, which introduced me to Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the buying of land in the region by wealthy Jews, and the pressuring of governments, notably the British government, to accept a more or less exclusively Jewish homeland in Palestine. For Palestinians, this has been a horror story, of displacement, cruelty and, especially in the early years of this displacement, up to and including the Nakba, international indifference. The land of Palestine, the land of Caanan, was multicultural for millennia. What has happened to it has been, from a humanist perspective, a catastrophe, resulting in hatreds and enmities that seem eternal. A friend of mine used to call it the problem of ‘heavy culture’, and as a person who doesn’t particularly identify with a nation (though a ‘sovereign citizen’ I most certainly am not), and enjoys the multiculturalism – and the remoteness – of the country I inhabit – I tend to agree. This morning I sat around a table conversing with two Columbians, two Chinese and an Australian, and in earlier conversation groups with Japanese, Sri Lankans, Koreans, Mexicans and Taiwanese, mostly recent arrivals, and I could feel in their faces, voices and movements that they were happy to be here – perhaps even relieved. I’m possibly being a little starry-eyed, but this is the sort of country I always want to live in.
And yet, I’m still drawn to the world’s horror-zones – Palestine, the USA, China, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine and the like – mostly hoping for good news rather than wallowing in shadenfreude. I think it’s just identifying with the human under stressful conditions, and hoping for happy endings, or just signs of improvement…
Anyway, I’m now reading with great interest The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, which gives a rich and broad account of this tragedy from something of an insider’s perspective, as his family have for generations been part of Palestine’s intellectual elite. I don’t suppose the book has a happy ending, but what could such an ending look like? A sudden, or gradual respect for those who can trace their ancestry in the region back thousands of years? But then, why would that ancestry make them more respectable than others? I presume that my ancestry goes back tens of thousands of years, as does everyone else’s, and if they stayed much of that time in one region, that hardly makes them more worthy than those who chose or were forced to move around. And of course for 90% of that ancestry there were no countries, though there were emerging languages and cultures, no doubt with relations between them varying from very warm to very cold….
All of this is what you might call humanist chatter. As I like to say, there are no real countries, we made them all up, mostly by people saying ‘this is our land exclusively and if you argue we’ll fight you and, if necessary, kill you, and by the way I think that land over there is ours too…’, etc, etc. But all of these people will die, and countries will disappear, and humans too, but the land will endure for longer, though not in its current form, for it too will transform, as it has in the past, and… to speculate further is a bit beyond me.
Where am I going with all this? I’m not sure, except that to say that a particular piece of land belongs to a particular culture is always questionable to say the least. We have become more international, more culturally fluid, more multicultural as they say, and this is bound to continue, so the key is to get people to stop fighting over what was never theirs to begin with, and to recognise that their project should be to mutually thrive, learn about and enjoy the land, the planet, the universe that we rather miraculously find ourselves being tangled up in.
Reference
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 2020
Limi girl – part 3
Jacinta: So it’s been a while, but let’s return to that fascinating movie about identity, ambition, entrapment and dislocation, Limi Girl.
Canto: After this poignant moment when Xiumei and Heigo recognise the difficulty of living independently, of controlling the forces around them, Heigo announces his arranged marriage to Shugio – ‘but it’s you I want to marry.’ When Xiumei rather cruelly ticks him off about this, he apologises, says he was joking.
Jacinta: And he clearly wasn’t, poor fellow. He’s fighting a losing battle.
Canto: Men chase, women choose. Desperately, he warns her that going to college is no guarantee of a good future. But she’s resolute in her irresolute way – it’s the closest thing to her dream. She walks off, leaving him to wonder if the chase is off.
Jacinta: In the next scene we see Shugio at home, apparently mixing farm work with school work – first writing on a blackboard (there appears to be a calculator on the table), then sifting some kind of foodstuff, then reading some paper. She might be learning some basic literacy and numeracy. She looks happy, no doubt dreaming of her marriage, till she sees Xiumei go by at the bottom of the hill, followed by Heigo. It’s more like a funeral procession than a chase, though. Angrily, she throws a basin of water down towards him.
Canto: Poor Heigo’s not too popular with the womenfolk. The next scene is quite obscure for non-Mandarin speakers. Heigo’s home with young Gaidi, having cooked her dinner. He finds her absorbed in watching a Chinese TV program with a lot of people staring at the Chinese flag, with a soothing voice-over. I think I hear the name Shifang. Heigo turns away, looking slightly perturbed.
Jacinta: Yes, don’t know what to make of it. But in the next scene Gaidi is in bed with her aunt, and has woken up in the middle of the night. She says she wants to go to school. To college in Szichuan, like Xiumei. To find her mother and father. So presumably the program she was watching has influenced her. Her aunt isn’t sympathetic. Shugio didn’t go to school and is having a good life. Xiumei, on the other hand… besides, she doesn’t have the money to waste on such things.
Canto: So Xiumei is being denigrated, but the more aspirational, such as Gaidi, see her as an inspiration. In the next scene, Xiumei is out with her fellow-villagers, all female, working in the ‘fields’ (actually tough, wooded mountainsides) digging up fleece-flower roots (used in TCM – traditional Chinese medicine – and therefore of very doubtful efficacy). One of the girls steals a root that she has dug up, leading to a confrontation. Another girl joins in and they mock the ‘college student’, who finally storms off, vowing to go back to college. Clearly there’s jealousy here, and a fear/dislike of ‘difference’, typical of a traditional culture.
Jacinta: I’m interested in these fleece-flower roots. Apparently they’re used for hair growth by ‘increasing blood circulation’, but that was on a beauty site. A google search turns up numerous sites, none of them particularly trustworthy in my estimation. A Chinese site states this, in quite scientific-sounding, if garbled, language:
Modern researches showed that fleeceflower root has effects in lowering blood lipids and sugar, preventing atherosclerosis, immune enhancement [?], expanding blood vessels, promoting adrenal gland secretion and blood cell productions, smooth heart and brain circulations [?], protecting liver functioning, enhancing neural and bowel transmissions [wow?!], promoting hair growth, anti-septic and anti-aging [?].
All of which sounds absurdly impressive, but the reference it provides takes us nowhere. Still, I hope it really is the good oil, for the Limi people’s sake…
Canto: Yes, there are no reliable scientific treatments of this ‘superflower’ on the search list, and Wikipedia merely tells us that ‘fleeceflower’ is a common name for several different plants, so it’ll be a tough job getting to the truth of it all. And the fact that this somewhat marginalised culture is relying, at least in part, on these doubtful TCM products for survival is another worrisome sign.
Jacinta: I like the way Xiumei stands up for herself when she’s mocked. She’s always feisty. So she heads back home with her donkey, but when she stops to drink at a stream, her donkey jogs off, after shrugging off its load – baskets full of plants. Xiumei has to carry the load herself. Meanwhile Gaidi, who recovers her donkeys, sets out with Haigo to find and help her. They find her struggling uphill with her baskets. Heigo chides her for ‘being like this’ – presumably referring to her stubborn independence. Xiumei, exhausted, complains tearfully that everybody, even the animals, are bullying her. Nevertheless she lets herself be ‘rescued’ by her ‘sister’ and her suitor. They ride off on what appears to be the village motorbike.
Canto: Yes, a most versatile machine, now carrying three people and a couple of hefty baskets. Next we see Shugio, again doing physical work – she appears to have a herbal medicine-type business operating from home – together with some kind of study, as she examines papers. She sees Heigo arrive from her window, with baskets, and looks pissed off. Heigo announces that he has come to sell herbs. Shugio’s angry because she knows the herbs have been harvested by her arch-rival Xiumei. She agrees to buy the stuff but – never again! Heigo then returns with the empty baskets to Xiumei and Gaidi, who are hiding round the corner. He hands Xiumei the money from Shugio, then tries to talk her out of trying to earn money for her education in such a piecemeal, grinding way. This time young Gaidi speaks up, defending her ‘sister’ and announcing that she too will earn money by her hard work, so that she can go to college in Sichuan and find her parents. Still Heigo insists on giving Xiumei some money, which she reluctantly accepts via Gaidi.
Jacinta: And these scenes highlight the interconnectedness of village life, where enemies must still have commercial connections, where one person’s actions influence another’s – everyone is in each other’s way, and co-operation is necessary for survival.
Canto: So the trio ride off again on the motorbike, taking Xiumei home, apparently with Shugio’s blessing, though Heigo claims, probably rightly, that she’s only faking civility.
Jacinta: Next we see that Xiumei and Gaidi have been dropped off, and then the two females separate, at a kind of outdoor entrance constructed of wood. I’m fascinated by the depictions of rural life here – everything is indoor-outdoor, a far cry from our constructed indoor worlds. Anyway, it seems the pair live side by side, but not together. Or maybe Gaidi is just seeing her elder ‘sister’ to the door.
Canto: In the next scene we have book-burning, always a bad sign, and a heavy symbol. Xiumei’s father is angrily tearing up her college books and throwing them into the fire. Her mother rescues some of them, then Xiumei arrives and protests passionately. Her father, half-brought to his senses, half-relents and stomps off. Her mother consoles her, defends her tormented husband, and brings news of the village gossip. She shouldn’t be hanging out with the engaged Heigo, and she should reconsider all this college malarky. Xiumei, devastated and tearful at all these forces arrayed against her, sobs out that she ‘will not submit to fate’.
Xiumei pleads with her father to stop burning her books
Jacinta: It’s another powerful yet low-key moment. I want to shout for her and I want to cry. How well this captures the struggles of the poor. No, not the poor, but those trapped in a web of culture, a culture that understandably wants to maintain itself as it has been for centuries, huddled in a sense with its back to the changing, widening and deepening world around it. We often see these cultures, off-handedly, as lacking, smothering – their shared knowledge of soil, seasons and locality irrelevant to the modern world. Xiumei is half-keen to strip off that knowledge and take on modern clothing, but she’ll inevitably be caught between two worlds and may not succeed or be happy in either.
Canto: Well meanwhile life and the movie goes on. In the next scene, Xiumei’s tormented father visits her as she sleeps in her bedroom, tries to make sense of the schoolbooks there, the posters on her wall, and tucks her in gently. Next morning, Heigo is waiting on his motorbike to take Xiumei to the fields, but she ignores him, saddling up her donkey. As she passes him, she says that his fiancée should ‘watch her mouth’ – presumably it’s Shugio who’s spreading the gossip – and her father later shouts to him a reminder that he’s due to be married (the poor sod), and he also reminds him who the motorbike belongs to.
Jacinta: Yes, but without telling the viewers. Who does that bloody bike belong to? Maybe it’s a community bike. Maybe he’s reminding Heigo of the community values he’s apparently trashing as he chases Xiumei while being engaged more or less against his will to Shugio. The cultural web is doing its ensnaring job.
Limi Girl – part 2
Jacinta: So, Heigo takes up the washerwomen’s sad song on the lakeside, and we see the hard, basic work of the villagers, and the beauty of the mountainous countryside. A reality view juxtaposed with a touristy view.
Canto: Right, we’re back with Limi Girl – a long review, or more like one of those chats through the movie that you get on DVD extras.
Jacinta: Or used to get. And it’s by outsiders rather than insiders, so not so interesting…
Canto: But more critical, in a good way. So in the next scene the camera slowly drifts across Xiumei’s bedroom-study, where she’s writing and contemplating and looking melancholy. Above her head is a portrait of a dancer, which she stares at…
Jacinta: My guess is she’s confused, and not at all confident about becoming a dancer, or returning successfully to college.
Canto: So she goes to her father to talk. She explains to him that when she dropped out she decided that she would study hard and re-enrol in a ‘normal college’…
Jacinta: That’s an interesting piece of exposition. What kind of college was she enrolled in before?
Canto: Yes it’s confusing – either she went to the city to enrol in a dance college or she dropped out because she wants to go to dancing school…
Jacinta: It must be the first option. So now she feels like a failure and a disappointment about the dance thing.
Canto: She tells her father it will be cheaper and she might get a ‘national student loan’, but he says this is impossible.
Jacinta: In other words he forbids it.
Canto: She doesn’t respond for a moment, then finally says she has decided….
Jacinta: It’s a lovely scene, in the silence her breathing becomes heavy as if his words have winded her. But then there’s defiance.
Canto: So now there’s an argument, she’s in no position to decide, he told her the dancing would never amount to anything and now they’re in debt. She vows to pay it all back, tearfully saying she wants more than a good village life.
Jacinta: She’s distraught more than angry. Note that after the first day back she’s reverted to traditional garb. She’s caught between two worlds.
Canto: So Xiumei walks off into the night, and a woman comes in and says ‘Xiumei’s father, you shouldn’t treat her that way’. He looks gloomy.
Jacinta: Who is she? Doesn’t sound like Xiumei’s mum. A neighbour?
Canto: Not sure. Next Xiumei is out on the mountainous slopes collecting roots and herbs, working hard. She reaches a high point and looks out over the beautiful wooded mountains and valleys of her homeland. She’s in turmoil. She trudges back home with her donkey and her load of herbs.
Jacinta: Here it might be apposite to speak of the music, which I found very effective in its understated way. Evocative, wistful.
Canto: Heigo walks through the countryside with his mother.
Jacinta: The one who’s supposed to be in hospital.
Canto: He’s complaining about how she set him up with Shugio, while she says that it’s his duty as an adult to marry – he’ll be laughed at otherwise. He mocks the suggestion, and starts to sing another song, but his mother insists he go to see Shugio’s family to make up for his poor behaviour.
Jacinta: So next we have Heigo sitting beside his mother, or maybe Shugio’s mother, discussing the wedding with Shugio’s family over cups of tea. They’ve been engaged for 20 years, she says, and should’ve been married long ago.
Canto: And the others agree, talking over Heigo’s head, as people do in court.
Jacinta: Heigo himself looks barely 20 years old, poor thing. Finally he gets up and asks Shugio to step outside so they can ‘nurture their feelings.’
Canto: He’s not happy, and Shugio follows him out, trying to keep up with him. He rounds on her, accusing her of luring him back from Guangdong for this ‘trivial matter’ of marriage. And of course Shugio is shocked and annoyed at this reaction. Heigo, it seems, wants to give the impression that all this ‘arranged marriage’ stuff is beneath him, and that Shugio, too, is beneath him. ‘You don’t understand me at all’, he says.
Jacinta: This is one of many moments in the film where so much is revealed in a few words. Here we’re both slightly repelled by Heigo’s arrogant dismissiveness and sympathetic to his unfocussed but intense aspirations.
Canto: Shugio responds well, after consideration. She may not know him entirely, but she has tended and nurtured him, and dreamed of their future life together. But yes, she says, ‘you’ve broadened your horizon and now you are bored’. Heigo seems sympathetic, but insists – this was a match created by their parents, now they’re grown up and free to choose for themselves…
Jacinta: He ignores the fact that she has already chosen him.
Canto: He declares his choice – he doesn’t know how to live with someone who doesn’t know him.
Jacinta: But who ever knows another, or himself?
Canto: Upon saying this he flounces off, and she responds, most heart-rendingly, ‘I don’t know how to live with someone else either’.
Jacinta: They’re both exaggerating their inabilities.
Canto: Next, Gaidi meets up with ‘sister’ Xiumei, still collecting herbs on the mountainside. She has a pair of shoes for her, from cousin Heigo. Xiumei wants them sent back, but softens when she sees Gaidi’s disappointment. So they trudge together along mountain paths, with the gift, and a trailing donkey.
Jacinta: The camera again lingers here on the lush beauty of this landscape. In the previous scene we heard a cock crowing as the betrothed couple disputed under the trees. This play between the physical beauty of place and the nurturing atmosphere of domesticity – where everyone’s a sister or a cousin – and the sense of constraint and even suffocation for these young aspirants, this is so beautifully handled I think.
Canto: In a clearing, Xiumei dons the new red dancing shoes from her cousin, and dances, while Gaidi watches entranced. For a while they dance together, a slow swaying dance, arms akimbo. Then Gaidi takes her turn for a solo, as the sun begins to set.
Jacinta: Note that Xiumei turns contemplative, watching Gaidi. Thinking about dance, the fantasy, the reality…
Canto: And looks a little melancholic, I’d say. In the next scene Gaidi sheepishly approaches ‘sister Xiumei’, who’s emptying her basket, perhaps as food for some farm animals. Gaidi’s cattle, or the family’s cattle she’s been tending, have run off, and damaged a neighbouring wheat crop. So now she’s afraid to return to her aunt, where she’ll likely get a beating. Xiumei offers to return with her, to protect her, so they head off together. Her aunt is already angry, and tries to get at Gaidi with a broom. She’s angry about the loss of money, as they’ll have to compensate the neighbour. Xiumei steps between them, saying ‘don’t hit her any more’, so this is perhaps a common occurrence, ‘she’s just a kid’. So the argument continues, with Gaidi’s aunt, who’s also Heigo’s mother, asserting her right to beat her whenever she likes, since she feeds and clothes her..
Jacinta: A useful device for bringing Heigo and Xiumei together again, and here’s where we get some more useful exposition.
Canto: Yes, because Heigo appears, tries to calm his mother and tells Xiumei not to interfere, but the headstrong Xiumei won’t have any of that. ‘You wouldn’t let her go to school, and yet you beat her like this’. Not surprisingly, the older woman responds by mocking Xiumei’s school failure – ‘you must’ve done something shameful while you were away.’ Xiumei is stung, can’t think of a retort, and flounces off.
Jacinta: And naturally Heigo seizes his chance to get her alone.
Canto: Yes but before that, we focus briefly on Gaidi and her aunt. With Xiumei gone, and Heigo off after her, Gaidi is ordered inside. Her aunt follows her, picking up the broom, but then she tosses it aside before entering the house.
Jacinta: So Xiumei is having her positive influence. It’s neatly observed.
Canto: So Heigo begins by apologising for his mother, but Xiumei shrugs it off, ‘I’m used to it.’ Then she tells him she will return the shoes tomorrow.
Jacinta: They sure know how to hurt each other.
Canto: Of course Heigo objects. He bought them for her off his first pay in Guangzhou, has been keeping them for her ever since.
Jacinta: They sure know how to make each other feel guilty.
Canto: So Xiumei gives him a speech with obvious similarities to the one he gave Shugio. Things have changed, they’re not kids anymore, it’s water under the bridge, she doesn’t want this kind of life.. But Heigo wonders, understandably, about the change. It’s only been a year – he’s been working, she’s been to college. She can only say, much as Heigo said to Shugio, ‘you don’t understand me’.
Jacinta: It’s the old story of unequal feelings. Shugio loves Heigo, but Heigo can’t return the love, partly because she represents the past to him. Heigo loves Xiumei and she in return wants to transcend the past that he represents to her. There’s a fearful symmetry here. But there’s also in this dialogue, especially from Xiumei, another fearfulness, or a great uncertainty, about how to live, the difficulties of going Outside, to the City, the Great World.
