beyond resistance

by yaman salahi

Ethnicity and nationality, once they dominate the discourse of resistance, often spoil it by muddling its purpose. Check the response of minorities that have faced repression or persecution in America: “Proud to be Mexican,” “Proud to be Black, “Proud to be Arab,” etc.

A group of people, once excluded and rejected, responds by formulating an identity around that exclusion.What grows out of nothing more than a common disposition in a structure of power, however, leads to a pursuit of other common defining characteristics. We think that if we control our identity, we control our selves, and we have dutifully resisted the imposition of an undesirable social order.

Ironically the criteria for our identity of resistance is often not something we have defined, but rather is precisely what those we resist have defined, if not invented. Black resistance, for example, did not rise organically out of a natural need to “be Black,” but instead because others forced that need; in other words, they forced being “Black” as a political identity by using the criterion of skin color as a basis for political organization, originally as slaves and later as second-class citizens.

The source of this identity of resistance often pollutes our own formulation of it. A common phenomenon is that we have “pride” in that identity. In doing so we run into problems. With pride, we are no longer resisting that imposition, but reversing it. We are not struggling against the structure of that imposition, but merely against its current configuration. We want instead to be on top, and the original imposers, to be on bottom.

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Am I proud to be an Arab? No, I only happen to be one. Should I be proud to be an Arab? What is pride about something I am not responsible for, other than chauvinism?

Pride is a response to shame. If the dominant order suggests shame for being Black, or Mexican, or Arab, or Native American, then we reject it by saying no, I’ll be proud.

But with pride, we haven’t resisted: we’ve reflected. We strengthen the proud (“proud to be an American”) when we use their words. Opposing them with their own terms is useful for drawing attention to the bankruptcy of their position, but in and of itself that critique does not provide an alternative way. When we treat the critique as if it were itself the alternative, we never embark on a path away from what we resist.

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Is this magazine an expression of pride? No. This is not an Arab magazine. It is not written by Arabs, or for Arabs. We don’t even know what Arabs are--and neither do Arabs themselves. In a subtle margin in the first issue, we asked the question: “What is an Arab, anyway?”

We should have known that with a title like the a-Rab, we would be confused for an Arab magazine. But the most rewarding appreciation is that of subtlety: and we leave that as the most obvious proof to readers that this is not an Arab magazine.

What is this magazine, then? It is an a-Rab magazine. a-Rab is not an ethnic category. It is a political and social one.

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Our first issue was loud, and did not leave any ambiguities about our opposition to this order. It was celebrated by some and reprimanded by others. Many, confusing it for an Arab magazine, suggested that it was the “wrong approach,” that “Arabs should integrate,” they should “work for the government” because that is how they could actually “influence and change policies” they didn’t like. Otherwise, we would simply be “shooting blanks.” You had to find yourself in an existing position of power to effect change.

Nothing is permanent. The system that is does not need to be. Working within a system breathes life into it. Working outside of it breathes life into us.

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I don’t want power or positions. I don’t want leaders. History, the way we learn it, has us believe that everything happens because of leaders. That Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement. But King would have been nothing without the sweat and blood of millions of others. Even God is nothing without worshippers.

If we want leaders with power and position, we want pride. Then, we are not resisting, but reflecting.

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We create power. When we cede it to an office, that office has power over us. It is not the other way around.

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The truth is, I want to wreck it all. I don’t want to turn it upside down: I want to flatten it. I don’t want to put the good in power, I want to put power in the good.

I want to destroy power. I am not looking for a messiah. I am looking for action because actors make power. Those who lead only do so because others believe they do--but we are all actors.

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So we return to the a-Rab. In the first issue we put an emphasis on the importance of narrative in formulating our selves, in controlling our identity, and controlling our place in society.

But what is narrative? Is it the end or the means?

***

Two weeks ago at a table for a student group against Israeli apartheid, I was approached by a visitor from Israel who was scouting the school. In a situation like that, it is tempting to engage in a loud argument, hurling body counts or witty one-liners at the other person.

Such a debate misses an important opportunity. A debate, after all, is about performing for an audience, not engaging with the opponent. You are not actually communicating with the other person in a debate.

Instead, and almost naturally, you throw out a story. Calm down, take a seat: listen to me. Let’s speak like people, not with slogans.

Through this you understand how someone with 3 years of service in the Israeli occupation army as a commander never considered himself to be in an aggressive position. You understand that in dealing with him, you are not supposed to convince him to leave his aggression, but to abandon his idea of self-defense. You understand what communication is and you see once and for all the frailty and danger of a debate with no audience.

Some respond to such a story with ridicule. He’s not “right,” his idea of self-defense is “unjustified” and “unacceptable.”

But all of these points have no consequence in the world: his beliefs do not have to be sound to play a role in this world. People make all sorts of decisions and believe in all kinds of things. If we, removed, approach them “empirically,” dissect them into “parts,” and then make a “rational” conclusion about what they believe, we have done nothing.

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This is not a rational world. We can’t observe it rationally, as rational analysis requires an object. To make a pure object of the world, we must be outside of it, but this is a condition we can never enter since we are inescapably a part of the world around us, as it is of us. Even our analyses are an active part of the world they pretend to analyze. To comprehend the world, we must engage it on its terms, we must be a part of it in the most intimate way. We must recognize that no matter how we try, we will always be a part of it in the most intimate way.

So it is for all Others. Let us approach them intimately, and let them do the same. We do that through the engagement of narratives. Narrative is a means of engagement, and we must engage all in terms particular to their narrative, not our own.

This is not acceptance or compliance, but comprehension. It is a point of departure for other movement. It is the only point of departure for other movement.

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What does it mean to engage another on her own terms? Let’s assume that the Other is the Israeli, and that “we” are the Palestinian. Now, let’s look at the types of Other amongst the Israelis (already, we bely the idea of the Other).

The Other-closest-to-us might be considered to be the one that opposes the occupation and the apartheid premises of the most commonly discussed two-state scenarios.

How does the Other-closest-to-us engage the other Others? Amongst one example of the Other-closest-to-us, the refuseniks (soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories), we generally do not find people who find grounding in something other than the same military they refuse to serve in. They are not pacifists who refuse the military altogether, but rather they oppose its current activites. Whereas the Israeli military considers itself in terms of service to ‘national’ values, the refusenik appeals to those same values, elaborating the ways in which the Israeli military itself betrays those values.

This is a strong critique because it shatters the narrative, precisely because both the narrative and the critique share the same stated principles and values. The shattering of the narrative may lead to the shattering of its parallel reality; but even when it does not, it exposes that reality as hollow, thus opening the way for future displacement.

In the context of this example, the question might arise for a refusenik: if the Israeli military has been shown to be violating its own values or principles, then what exactly are its principles, values, or goals, and do those actual values line up with my own? In this fashion, many of the refuseniks who originally spoke in the language of patriotism later began to articulate their position more radically once they had seen that their country’s actual values, had betrayed their own.

In this gap between a narrative, its premises, and its realities, we have the potential for travel between narratives, and between realities.

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When we narrate, we give others the opportunity to comprehend us, whether they recognize that motion or not. It gives us the ability to understand how to communicate with people so radically removed from ourselves. But narration is not the final solution, nor anything close to it. Though fundamental, it is a very preliminary step. By itself it does nothing and without it we could do nothing.

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We are narratives, and we engage them. The most contentious struggles take place between narratives.

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Narrative is not pride, but it is certainly opposed to shame. It is self-assertion, whether that self is independent or not. When it is independent, we have that elusive third space: something a little like opposition and resistance, without reflection.

We have something to work with which is free and is based in itself rather than on the resisted. For resistance is both inevitably dependent upon and forever restrained by the resisted, grammatically and practically.

We should not think of resistance as a response, but as a starting point for movement, albeit a highly contextualized one. Or, more precisely: it is a starting point that recognizes and refuses its context.

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Narrative gives a context to our actions and circumstances. It gives a context to everything that happens to us or around us.

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In acquiring an ethnic identity in the context of fighting foreign domination or domestic marginalization, resistance acquires the qualities of the resisted. When that happens, we are no longer involved in an ethical battle between right and wrong, but in a battle of mights between strong and weak.

If ours was an ethical position, then this unwitting shift to another set of terms not only shifts our external image, but also tampers with and corrupts our internal goals and aspirations.

Sometimes, this transition is so subtle that we do not even notice until it’s too late. Recall the horror with which some revolutionary movements have been considered in hindsight: how could what was once beautiful have become so monstrous?

Like that.

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Resistance is spoilt when the identities that constitute the we/they dichotomy become based in immutable identities that it should not consider as units of analysis in the first place, like ethnicity. The earlier labored division of people into categories of we, the Other, the other Others, and the Other-closest-to-us illustrated the weakness of political identities constituted in this way.

But how else can this identity be constituted?

We must shift away from a we (and a “they”) that is based in our selves. Such a superficial we, which might be based around any number of identities, be they religious, nationalist, ethnic, sexual, etcetera, is doomed to paralyze any resistance movement because it establishes inescapable categories of people to which not all persons can belong--and one requisite feature of any resistance concerned with emancipation, is that any person must have the ability to join, support, and benefit from it.

Our identity of resistance should not be based in actual facts about our selves. Instead, it should be based around our purpose, or our cause--these are things to which any person can attach. They more accurately identify those who are with or against the resistance, and they are, at the root, based in ethical principles, thus decreasing the likelihood of an unwitting shift to an identity or a conflict grounded in non-ethical terms.

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Arab, like Mexican, like Black, like Native American, is a political category established and used by the same people we are resisting. We should not use that label or that category politically, except in that context, in the context of undermining that system.

When it comes to being proactive, however, Arab is no longer a feasible political category. If we treat it as one, we are re-building ourselves in the image of those we resist.

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The a-Rab is not an Arab magazine. a-Rab is not an ethnic category; it is a political one. a-Rab is our identity of resistance, and narrative is its means of expression and engagement.

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Yaman Salahi is a student at UC Berkeley. He blogs at http://www.yamansalahi.com/.