The Mythology of the Tyrant and the Culture of Violence and Silence
The Mythology of the Tyrant and the Culture of Violence and
Silence
In the age of ambiguity which is prevailing over many matters, the affirmation must be repeated that those of Iraq s sensible writers and artists who are really concerned for Iraq as a country and a people must be in favor of revealing its wounds, not covering them up under any pretext. Fear breeds more fear, and nothing will save Iraq from its dark night except the courage to speak the truth and stand openly against all the crimes, atrocities and major sins that have drowned Iraq in seas of blood and savagery. The tyrant makes his people into his own kind . This frightening expression was uttered by Albanian author Ismail Kadri, one of the international writers who are preoccupied intellectually and artistically in dealing with the methods and ways of dictatorial regimes and their evil consequences. The laboratory which he used for the conduct of his experiments was his own country, Albania under its now dead dictator Enver Hoxha. Although that Albanian laboratory and its data are not different in their general indications from any other location which has been ruined by a dictatorial regime, whatever the ideological banner which it is carrying and whatever the country whose liberty it is oppressing, to say that the tyrant makes a people into his own kind is enough of an exaggeration to reveal the tyrant s total, in fact tyrannical, ability. Even the person who says it almost falls into the circle of deliberate confusion which the dictatorial regime fabricates through its media and instruments of propaganda to deepen the impression and illusion of its omnipotence and the mythology of the dictator. This is what we insist is not true, is corrupt, is wrong about the facts of human history both recent and remote. These are evidence that a dictator, at the moment when he crumbles and his regime collapses, reveals a lamentable fragility, a farce that arouses astonishment at the ability of such a dummy to terrify and enslave peoples and nations for years, even long, bitter decades. Tyrants do not have total or legendary ability. Hence their ability to falsify and distort shrinks to the limits of changing limited sectors of peoples into shadows of the tyrant, mouthpieces of his, followers and executioners. The emptiness and cowardice of all these are exposed at the moment of collapse, which does not make an exception of any tyrant, from Nero of Rome to Ceausescu of Bucharest in our present era. Limited sectors are distorted and influenced by falsification among the peoples in the shadow of a tyrant. This means that larger and broader sectors resist and are courageous. This resistance takes on different forms, of which perhaps the most notable and widest in its area is resistance with silence, which creates a reality known as the silent majority . One of the most notable sectors of peoples which show resistance to tyranny is the writers, artists and thinkers, who have left an outstanding heritage of resistance to tyranny which is unique in the diversity of its methods. This diversity is almost impossible to enumerate. There is the use of the language of silence which sometimes bursts out with what is difficult to utter in words. There is the use of the language of metaphor, whose indirect allusions, figurative expressions and symbols are endless. Among these we may count famous works in our Arab heritage like Kalila and Dimna and The Thousand and One Nights, and in the world heritage Don Quixote and a huge number of novels, plays, films, canvases, poems, songs, folk songs and riddles. These almost cover all the continents of the Earth, from Franco s Spain in Europe and Bokassa in Africa to those dictators in Latin America whom we were made to laugh at by great novelists from those countries like Asturias in The Green Pope and the Nobel Prizewinner Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch, intense laughter that is even side-splitting! This laughter gives the lie to the absolute will of the tyrants, dinosaurs which are no more than paper dinosaurs. So we see that the resistance of literature and art to tyranny is the most notable and obvious norm in peoples' struggles. Consequently the obedience of a handful of people who are counted as part of the current of literature and art to the will of tyrants is a kind of flagrant perversion of people who are supposed to be a distinctive elite in their societies. This does not mean making them alone bear the burden of condemnation, indeed the greatest volume of condemnation must be directed at the dictatorship and its ugliness for perverting those who are supposed as is self-evident to the aestheticism of human creativity in general. The Arms of the Republic of Fear This introduction and its ideas evoked each other in my mind when
confronting the examination of a document of literary criticism which I came
across recently, in the form of a book published from one of the places of Iraqi
exile in the era of the tyrant Saddam Hussein. There are more than three million
Iraqis intellectuals in particular whom the oppression and harshness of this
regime has compelled to leave their country and disperse in various countries of
the world. They endure distress, misery, the pain of separation from their
country, moral drowning and sometimes actual drowning - as keeps happening with
refugee boats in the northern and southern seas of the Earth. The book or document is called The Culture of Violence in Iraq by
the exiled Iraqi critic who now lives in Sweden Salam Abboud. It is published by
Dar Al-Hamal, which was established by another Iraqi exile, Khalid Al-Jamali, in
the German city of Cologne. In justification of this book of criticism, the
author says, "The motives behind writing this subject are many, and foremost of
them is the condition of political ambiguity in the Iraqi situation and the
intellectual and behavioral complexity that ensues from this. It is an attempt
to re-examine some cultural-social matters. It is something that everyone avoids
going into, because of the consequences it brings in which people do not like to
be involved. Or in most instances they prefer to distance themselves from them,
and leave it up to those who are more eager than they to endure harm a precious
few to bear their burdens. From these lines we may draw conclusions of how far the situation
has gone in the Republic of Fear , since the network has extended its evils to
cause harm even to those who have gone outside its borders, if it can find a way
to do this. Although the book is confined to dealing with one of the subjects
of distortion which befallen Iraqi creativity, namely the subject of war in
literature , particularly the Iraq-Iran war or the so-called first Gulf war,
monitoring the mechanisms whereby many creative people were distorted under this
heading reveals the tragic nature of the moral even more than the material
oppression. Through it some creativity and many creative people are deformed
into going along with the pretexts of the dictator and his regime for continuing
the futility of that war, whose paltry gains were squandered in the end with a
stroke of a pen. When the dictatorship once again began to prepare itself to
embark on another war, it became certain that this dictatorship can only
continue under the auspices of conflagrations, wars and destruction.
Conflagrations and ruin of the country and its citizens first of all, and
conflagrations and ruin of whatever it could burn and in the surrounding region
after that. War as a profound human experience, because of its extreme
harshness, has created in the history of literature and art epics of profound
influence. Through these, creative contemplation has extended to probe into the
depths of the greatest questions of existence for human beings, like life and
death, love and conflict. Thus Love and Peace by Tolstoy, All Quiet on the
Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Hope by Andre Malraux, Three Soldiers by
Don Passos, Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov to
the end of that great list of creative works which have probed the depths of the
human soul by plunging into what war and its destruction brings about for human
beings. But in the shadow of terrorism by the ruling regime in Iraq internally,
the ideological clamor with its narrow horizon, and the superficial, ignorant
and stupid regime of corporals have excreted a so-called literature of war in
Iraq the Republic of Fear, if one may call textual monstrosities thus. Since a
text any text forms its writer just as the writer forms it, these textual
monstrosities (which have been called a literature of war) have carried out the
greatest movement of disfigurement of the creativity of dozens of Iraqi story
writers, novelists and poets. This is what the book or document of criticism
deals with, naming names, reading the works, with excerpts as proof, thereby
recording the crime. An harsh, trivializing authoritarian regime has set a horrifying
trap for the authors and poets of its country. What was demanded of them was no
less than to justify, explain theoretically and praise the continuing pursuit
of violence which provides this regime with the elements of its existence and
continuity. This book enumerates many bitter facts, and enumerates the tragedy
of those who fell into this trap and have become part of it, and the sorrows of
those who have tried to escape from falling between its savage jaws.
Salam Abboud wonders, How can a writer, who has found that war is
an ugly destruction that he cannot support or accept, express himself except by
saying that it is an insane, destructive and inhumane action. Such a writer
cannot under any circumstance have his say in a country ruled by Saddam or
Hitler, except in two ways. The first is by pretending to be stupid and writing
openly, and at the same time writing his last will and testament. Or else he can
be silent. One of those who chose silence about this war is the most famous
Iraqi poet Abdulwahhab Al-Bayati. He dealt with the destruction in front of him
in this way, as if he did not see it or hear about it! Consequently he was not
obliged to speak about it. He preferred to flee with his anthology of poems
Nahwa Tawasin al-Sama in the hope that they would rescue him from the evils of
the futile war which was raging on earth. Maybe he did not like to be a hero like Neruda, Hikmet and Lorca,
but he certainly knew that war, any war, is the first enemy of a poet before
being an enemy of the people. He departed God rest his soul with his mouth
completely clean, which is harmful to war. That is a way of confronting war,
whether some ill-intentioned people take it as malicious joy or it is taken as a
warning, both things are bitter and harsh. Silence as an Illness or Trickery Another poet, Rushdi Amil, also chose silence about this war, and
withdrew from people. There was no longer anybody to accompany him in this
loneliness apart from unconsciousness and illness. The regime s critics accused
him of "romanticism , an accusation which was equivalent to high treason at
that time. When the poet was cornered with a question from Hawass Al-Watan
magazine about his silence, he was compelled to give a reply that was a mixture
of suffering dipped in silence: There are no periods of silence I have passed
through, ever. Poetry is silence in its sweetest and most truthful condition. I
have never been silent. Silence means certain death. Sometimes silence becomes a
voice in the face of everything that disturbs people s lives. And sometimes
silence becomes the freedom which a human being practises. At least this poet
tried to resist tyranny and the futile war with silence, but others wrote
anthologies and volumes justifying and glorifying that war instead of exposing
its spuriousness and deception at an early stage, in order to preserve human
dignity and cut the reckless dictatorship down to size. What was demanded of Iraqi writers was to interpret the war not as
a human impasse on the surface of whose sufferings questions of human existence
are floating. Rather, it was demanded of them and of others to cheer and justify
the violence with which the wheel of the rabid, insane war was turning. Some
chose silence, like the two aforementioned examples. There was a third silence
about the futility and harshness of this war, by getting out of its age and
clinging to worlds that reject it, as did the short story writer Hamad Khudair,
who discovered a special astrolabe to contemplate the world and built an
observation tower through which he could look at his disgusted soul in front of
him on the battlefronts and in the streets. He expressed his choice by saying,
You expect me to present a vision of the so-called experience of writing,
whereas for eight years (namely the years of that war) I have been living in a
field of vision that has no limits of time or space to its area. Its signs are
coming to me from the silence of the first caves or from the towers of ancient
knowledge which surround me wherever I step and however I hold my pen.
Parallel to these mechanisms of silence, and under the oppression
of a despotic regime which does not know how to act except with instruments of
violence - in its various forms in dealing with those who disagree with it even
in literature and art, dozens - rather hundreds or maybe thousands - of texts
of stories , novels and poems have fallen into the trap. And their creative
writers have also fallen into one of the most astonishing manifestations of
historical deception, which has turned writers pens into butchers knives and
torches to ignite fires, in order to appease and go along with the violent
insanity of the dictator and his bloody regime. It is a distressing
manifestation for those who are involved in it, since they are criminals and
victims at the same time, victims of those who dragged them into this shameful
falsehood, and criminals because of their own participation, according to the
logic that texts make their writer. Let us contemplate: Ahmad Khalaf, in his short story Point of
Contact, says, I fired two shots at him, then a third, and I said the fourth is
for the wife s eyes! When the blade was plunged into his chest it made a noise
like a large piece of pottery being thrown from high up. Do you remember the
mule which threw itself from the hill? The poet Ali Al-Shalah, in his poem Iraq, wrote: A homeland whose pains we do not reveal, But we long for them. We march according to its voice, As it gives permission and we do not ask permission. Who are they demanding? The country of us all. The gardens of paradise are granted to us And we long for it. We love even the thieves in it, And the drunks, and the heat of the cells in the summer, and the whores, And the supporters, and then the opponents, and the informers, And those who were informed, and the prisons. Muhammad Hussein Aal Yasin, in his poem Al-Aradiyat, recites: We have marched to the fields of struggle, and their soil It cheers, welcoming us and glorifying God. And if a camp brings us together within its area, In every pulsing of our blood there is a camp. In Fahmi Al-Saleh s short story A Fiery Meeting: During my return
home after sixty days of war at one go, my mother said to me, weeping with joy
that I had returned safe, If I had known that you would suffer like this, I
would have strangled you when you were a baby in your cradle! In Abdulsattar Nasser s story In the Night of the Trench, he says:
Blood flows and the corpses are still soft and delicious to the crows, the
insects and the earthworms. The poet Muhammad Jamil Shalash, in his poem The Diaries of the Wife of a Man Who Was Killed, sings: Death is a right, Abu Luayy. Death is sweet when it is dictated by a living appeal, And death is sweeter When we are called to it By the knight Abu Uday . The poet Adnan Al-Sani virtually confesses: The corporal says, Death does not accept subtraction and addition. Choose for yourself a hole the size of your hopes, This is the age of holes . Buthayna Al-Nasseri, in her story The Prisoner s Return, writes:
"The prisoner returns to his family after an absence of more than a decade, but
his son (who was brought up in the school of the front) says to him, I wanted
you to remain a martyr in the eyes of my friends. How am I to show my face to
them after today? These are merely brief samples of what has happened in the field of
the culture of violence in Iraq, which has been patronized by the dictatorship
to justify and facilitate its own predilection for violence as a tyrannical
regime which depends on the two main pillars of fascism in every age and place,
namely cruelty and force. From the point of view of psychology and
justification, these two pillars become killing with an easy conscience, and
enjoyment from killing. If it is understood that these two pillars are necessary
for the regime to continue in power even for a time, the infiltration of the
shadows of these two pillars into literary expression even on the subject of war
becomes the real destruction and the clearest sign of the influence and
penetration of the culture of violence under Saddam Hussein s regime. They
reveal the cruelty and force by which this deformed content has been inserted
into the field of artistic creativity, its texts, writers, painters and poets.
It is a huge deformation and deformity, which has extended not only
to the fundamental principles of human behavior as expressed by these texts and
these writers and poets in terms of disfiguring and distorting human nature,
feelings and relationships, it has also gone so far as to devastate the
achievements of the creative process. It is a coerced distortion, and its
tragedy is that it is a flight from repression by the regime to self-repression
of creativity. This is a bitter tax to pay for living in a homeland which
specializes in killing its people , as Salam Abboud puts it. It would have been
better if he had said the regime which kills its people, indeed it is the regime
which kills both its country and its people. The writers and those who appease
it are saving their necks from its lethal grip by offering as sacrifices short
stories and poems which justify its savagery, support it and pave the way for
new tyrants to emerge. Under a culture based on destroying conscience, artistic expression
is rather like playing with poisonous snakes, according to the critic. He adds
in explanation that that there is no scope for creativity, because there is no
room for questioning the situation, nor is there any room for truthfulness in
expressing what is happening. In this circle of playing with snakes, purposeless writing came
into being, stories and poems without meaning except glorifying the game of
death directed by the gang of the riffraff, as the writer calls them. Texts were
born which are crude artistically and aggressive intellectually. Literary
perversions became sanctified like plagiarizing other people s models and
distorting them to serve the new mouthpiece, like the incident when a story
writer plagiarized the text of The Slain Lanterns of Mandali by the great
poetess Nazik Al-Malaika which had been published many years before the
plagiarist s text. The poetess had nothing to do with the game of inflaming
hatreds which the plagiarist practises in his text, since she used to describe
the historical relationship that links the two neighboring peoples, with a high
degree of responsibility and concern. What was the result of that on creative people themselves? The
author answers this question with his thesis that a split has occurred in the
personalities of Iraqi writers who have fallen into this trap of the culture of
violence. There were retreats which were only announced after flight to distant
places of exile. There were undoubtedly spiritual losses, whose symptoms were
those literary images which are truly articulate documents that with complete
clarity express one of the most grievous aspects of the spiritual losses of
creative Iraq: Enjoyment of the logic of occupying others, and the spread of the
language of conquest and extermination, were the logical prelude to justifying
the occupation of the souls of mothers, sisters, fathers and sons, and
exterminating them without mercy. In Search of a Horizon The author decides in his book to regard writers who have submitted
to the culture of violence as main partners in the regime's continuing crime.
And this is correct in my opinion with regard to a sizeable number of well-known
names which came into prominence before and after the war, and until the crime
of the invasion of Kuwait, which they played a demagogic role in justifying and
falsifying the facts about it. Most of these are leading members in ruling party
organizations. I can add that they were, from the beginning, a part of the
secret security and intelligence agencies. At their head are names - which some
still regard as patriotic and literary which played a direct part in
persecuting, torturing and killing people who were important in the realm of
literary and artistic creativity in Iraq. But there is no harm in us disagreeing
a little with the author in that we regard the list as too long. Among these
there are also victims of the regime and an involuntary and forced result of its
violence and cruelty, which even went so far as to use wives and children for
its revenge. The second matter that we regard as correct and agree with the author about it is the rejection of any attempt to justify what has happened and is happening in Saddam Hussein s Iraq on the grounds that it is part of the Iraqi cultural heritage. Iraq, regardless of the continued violence, bloodshed and subjugation through which it has passed for years in succession with change in the names and types of regimes, one cannot be reduced merely to bloody liquidation campaigns between political factions and coup d etats which rely on the language of killing and murder. This language is isolated in spite of its domination and the depth of its influence. But the language which has more continuity, life and depth is the language of the Iraq of poetry, literature and art, the Iraq of Al-Sayyab and Nazik Al-Malaika, of the melancholy of song, the birds of the betrayed marshes and the canvases of skilled plastic artists. This is the language that will remain in the end after the language of the culture of violence has devoured itself, and Iraq places itself on the road of democracy and peaceful dialogue. This is coming, beyond doubt.
|
|