“Recontextualizing Resistance”: Whose story is it anyway?

 

By karma Sami

 

 CAIRO, Nov. 19 (SEE)-'To tell my story’ comes lately, in different colours, shapes, and forms. In this volume issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017, and edited by Loubna Youssef and Emily Golson, the story of resistance is told from a prismatic view. Covering different fields and reading different texts, the thousand faces of resistance are exposed in print, on stage, or on screen.

The book is par excellence a meta-resistant critique in which the critical works contribute to form a narrative parallel to the selected creative texts, thereby, forming a larger narrative of resistance. The constituents are harmonious parts of a larger cultural body politic, raising the imaginative awareness and the knowledge of readers, of their past and present, to encourage their potential for a writerly/readerly ‘creative resistance’ in the future.

The book is pided into seven sections: Eyewitnesses, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Drama, Film, Poetry and Music, and Rhetoric. The contents of the book cover a wide and varied “theoretical and creative resistance texts written from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries.” (1) In the introduction,the editors, Youssef and Golson, explain the temporal and critical parameters of the term resistance as well as its vocabulary, limitations, and future potentials.

The introduction tells the story of resistance from its beginnings, starting with Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) whose seminal work Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine (1948-1966) inspired Elias Khouri and Edward Said as well, and opened up a path in literary and cultural criticism in which politicized creativity became acknowledged. Kanafani explained in his book that Literature of Resistance is usually documented “after liberation”. He warned that a writer/critic cannot address the issue of resistance in “cold objectivity”. Therefore, the reader should expect‘involvement’, and ‘nonstandard conditions’ of expression. The cultural/political involvement embraces all: writers, critics, and readers, in a series of ‘commitments’ and ‘obligations’. The end aim is to break the notorious “cultural siege” imposed by anyaggressive “coercive culture”. It was Kanafani who revolutionized in contemporary terms the vocation of the “writer/fighter” whose “literature/scythe (is) sharpened everyday and relentlessly to reap all the crooked black carob pods.” (58)

The rest is history; in the contemporary ‘cultural warfare’ the creative energy of writers, artists and critics is mobilized to create international meaningful forms of self-expressions. The term ‘resistance’ is no longer confined to the Palestinian cause or the Middle East. It extended its authority to challenge the question of cultural inequity and malpractices everywhere. It comes natural, therefore, that the book “touches upon the development of resistance art during the last seven decades through genres of autobiography, fiction, flash fiction, drama, film, music, poetry, and speeches, each of which adds a different perspective to (its) recontextualization of resistance.” (3)

The writer and critic are eye witnesses who are later to be joined by an aware reader. Writing and reading is a liberating, non-violent act of resistancewhich forms a meta/narrative that is part of the uneven struggle between the Establishment and Culture. To help citizens 'remember', the 'Book people', who were former scholars and ardent book fans, in Ray Bradbury’s, dystopian science fiction, 451 Fahrenheit, dedicated their whole being to memorizing books. Perhaps their faces did not glitter with the knowledge they carried, but they walked like glowing lanterns into dark paths of an enchanted forest. They were gladly human 'dust jackets for books' only to preserve their valuable contents to mankind.

In a similar act of resistance, through Recontextualizing Resistance, scholars go far beyond memorizing books. They choose to scrutinize a variety of print, visual and acoustic texts, uncovering theirlatent organisms of resistance. In a variety of interesting cultural encounters, we meet Mohamed Enani, Abdel-Tawab Youssef and his father Sheikh Youssef, Yusuf Idris and Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Susan Abulhawa, Jamal Mahjoub, Naguib Sorour, MouridAl-Barghouthi and many others. From the onset, readers are engaged in Enani’s heavily intertextual testimony and its free flow of reminiscent reflections, Youssef’s interpretation of her grandfather’s practicum of the Egyptian pedagogy of the oppressed, and Golson’s resistant poetics of silence. The journey continues with twenty dedicated scholars exploring the various forms of cultural resistance in many texts, andcontexts, all revisited and recontextualized.

The Cultural War has begun in defence of art, literature, history, memory, discourse, identity, and above all, humanity. Culture will not sink into "bestial oblivion". Each study will rather "tell (a) story" forming a culture of resistance of its own that will inspire writers, artists, and readers as to how they cancombat a hegemonic new world order implementingthe narrative, theatrical, poetic, cinematic, and rhetorical.

In the eighteen chapters of the book, culture is not compromised for the sake of politics. Resistance is neither geographically nor historically restricted. Its myriad transformations encourage further investigative and explorational research into the relatively newly-established resistance art. The scholarly collaborative work anchors its readers towards a versatile reception of “some forms of resistance (which) encourage thoughtful, positive interpretations of a moment.” (6)  Finally, the act of reading this valuable volume raises its readers’ awareness of the role of resistance forms in“advancing the human condition”, and consequently helps “further the understanding of these resistance concerns.” (6) The “rest is (not) silence”, but rather a series of more acts and critiques of creative resistancein which the artist follows Kanafani’s advice to sharpen his/her scythe everyday to reap all the crooked black carob pods.

Dr. Karma Sami is a Professor of English Drama, at the Faculty of Alsun, Ain Shams University.