Dear Haneen
Sophia Bchara
May 10th, 2024
Dear Haneen,[1]
I heard from Rawan that you two have been very active in the Palestine Solidarity student encampment. I knew you would be. I’ve been searching the video footage to see if I could spot you out there with your kuffiyeh and your courage. I’ve been moved to tears every day by your generation, your fearlessness, the clarity of your convictions that justice is possible and that truth must, and will, prevail.
The apocalyptic scenes from Gaza--this nightmare that never ends--have sucked all the energy out of me… My heart is finding permanent residence in my throat, my brain is struggling to create language, my eyes are consistently unfocused. I know you know the feeling. I remember talking about it with you last year. For children of war like us, watching this nightmare unfold on our tiny screens elicits a deep body memory. Fight, flight or freeze. I see you fighting while I freeze. I used to have the energy to fight, to stand with thousands and protest American foreign policy in the “Middle East,” but the grief and trauma of being a child of the Lebanese civil war compounded with the August 4th, 2020 port explosion in my home city of Beirut, then the passing of my father the semester you were in my class, then the unfathomable scenes from Gaza, it feels like there’s no more fight left in me. So, when I see you and your peers out there fighting, relief sets in. You still have it in you. Al Hamdulilah, they still have it in them! But, more than relief, my hope is restored, and it’s not just mine, I’d argue that universal hope is restored.
I’ll never forget how in our Politics of Language class, when referencing Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture that we had read as a class, you asked me with such earnestness: “Professor Bchara, if ‘the bird is in our hands’[2] how do we do language that heals, how do we break through these ‘metadiscursive regimes’ that have manufactured our consent for colonization, violence, profit over people, consumerism over climate.” The fact that you asked me that question is what gives me hope. The fact that you had the wisdom and the heart to ask that question means we may come back from the brink of disaster.
Remember the text we read by Andrea Mayr, that line we all really liked: “the microstructures of language make up the macrostructures of society”? Well, here we are in the middle of these macrostructures as we witness the genocide of Palestinians on our screens… as we witnessed in Iraq after 9/11, or the war in Ukraine still unfolding, or the genocides in Darfour, and the countless other horrors around the world… When language is used to dehumanize and demonize a population, those who accept those depictions are able to justify moral atrocities and violations of international law.
The thing is that even if the corrupt politicians themselves were to disappear (and there sure isn’t a shortage of those types these days) the macrostructures of violence and injustice, and the microstructures of language designed to support them, would remain intact. You might remember Foucault’s theory of power? There isn’t really a clear nexus for power. Power no longer exists in the ideological apparatuses of the State--it probably never really did. Foucault called this a type of microfascism. We talked about it as diffuse power, a networked power. The profound danger here is that power recreates itself through language and knowledge, which in turn get corrupted by power.
As Morrison put it:
There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all-if the bird is already dead.
In class, you told me that it was disturbing and scary to think of the bird as already dead, of power as a diffuse network, because that means there’s no more hope, that we won’t be able to fight and overcome these discursive regimes that force us into complacency, apathy, silence. You asked, “what if we wake up one day and think how the hell have we accepted this corrupt and evil system for so long? How the hell have we been complacent?”
You asked that in October 2022. And, in October 2023, you did not accept the “corrupt and evil system.” You and your generation rose up and mobilized all over the world, following the footsteps of generations of students before you.
Remember in Discipline and Punish, Foucault reminds us that when executions by the State were public--by the Guillotine or by hanging--the people often revolted. Mass riots against the State. But, then state control, state executions, were institutionalized. Behind the prison walls, injustice by the state remained rampant, yet invisible.
In 2020, when a camera caught the public execution of George Floyd, corrupt power became visible again. And today, as we witness the genocide in Gaza, corrupt power is visible on a mass scale. When violence becomes visible, when it breaks through the seams of hidden, structural injustice, the world wakes up. And, the protests begin anew.
Towards the conclusion of Morrison’s piece, she says: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
Language helps civilizations heal… The beauty and hope in that is that we can break the cycle of violence--often provoked through vicious language--with language itself. It’s like the antidote to the thing is the thing itself. So, how do we actually do that?
You’re already doing it through public resistance and linguistic micro-resistances that push us all to collectively un-manufacture consent. You’re looking at language with a critical eye and seeing clearly the metadiscursive regimes that are responsible for the dominant, mainstream narrative about Palestine, the Palestinian people, and the historical dispossession and systematic erasure of the Palestinian people by Zionist regimes. You’re thinking about the who, what, when, where, why of every statement you’re hearing. You’re not only studying, but teaching, the history of colonialism in Palestine and how the colonial project continues to unfold through linguistic tactics. You’re recognizing that language isn’t a neutral reflection of truth, a benign tool for communication of ideas, but can be a powerful tool for corrupt power, and you are helping others see how that works. You’re seeing that the charge of anti-semitism is being wielded as a linguistic tactic to weaken your calls for justice by invoking the memories of the Holocaust and anti-Jewish sentiment throughout history. But, your collective action with your Jewish peers is challenging the metadiscursive regimes that are trying to paint you as anti-semitic. As you move forward, always remember that “words create worlds,” that the language we choose often constructs the realities we inhabit, so we need to do language that is kind, that is generous and compassionate, that is creative and generative, that does not accept divisiveness, that never dehumanizes or excludes another being.
The bird is in your generation’s very capable hands,[3] يا حنين . Thank you for showing us what “love looks like in public.” (Remember that quote by Cornel West?)
We will follow your lead.
Onward in hope and solidarity,
Prof. B
References
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage.
Mayr, A. (2008). Language and Power: An introduction to institutional discourse. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Morrison, T. (1993, December 7). Nobel Lecture. [Speech audio recording]. The Nobel Foundation. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/
West, C. (2011, April 17). Justice is what love looks like in public [Speech]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGqP7S_WO6o
[1] Arabic name meaning “longing, yearning, nostalgia, deep love or affection”
[2] In Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture, she begins with a parable about an old, blind, wise woman, who is the daughter of slaves. This woman is visited by a group of young children who tell her they are holding a bird in their hands and ask her if the bird is alive or dead. Being blind, the woman does not know whether the children are even holding a bird at all, but her response is that while she can’t tell them if it’s alive or dead, she can say that the bird is “in your hands.” The Nobel lecture centers on the image of the bird that the children and we, the readers, eventually come to understand as a symbol for language.
[3] “Dear Haneen” in Arabic
Sophia Bchara is a pen name. The author of this piece made the difficult decision to protect her identity due to the repressive climate in higher education at this time and her status as contingent faculty. The institution where she teaches is located in a state currently under conservative leadership, and these politics have impacted the university's governance and its position on teaching or research activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Given the author's local context, it is unclear at this time if scholarship or creative work that expresses support for the Palestinian cause would be misunderstood or framed as anti-semitic.
