I’ve always been a bit sceptical about my own relationship to Arabness as a vicarious “proxy ethnicity” — I’ve recently written long, soul-searching emails to various friends about this issue, and it’s always been funny when H introduces me to people as “my cousin,” to various double-takes. But I really am her cousin, and she’s mine — this is very important to me. And I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: in these times, being far away from our friends and family from Sydney’s Lebanese communities has been really distressing. I miss being a part of this palpable web of solidarity.
What relationship do these intimate solidarities have to more programmatic kinds of solidarity — the kinds you find expressed in political pronouncements? My ambivalent position of feeling both inside and outside a community presents me with my own small opportunity to unpack some possibilities: for a start, it’d be a terrible mistake to simply map the surface of deeply felt affiliations and practices of care (i.e. the apparent operations of “being part of a Lebanese community”, whether by birth or association) onto a supposedly “organic”, unitary representation of “the Lebanese community” on one level, and Lebanon’s national interests and its authoritative representation by particular groups on another. (Networks of care impode into niche-market structural narcissism, which in turn implodes into reactive nationalism.) This would be as ludicrous as reifying the complex way “family” has been important to me in this current crisis as an enthusiasm for “the family” and patriarchy.
Both of these reifying slippages are celebrated by totalising revivals of “anti-imperialism” as national(ist) resistance — the former in an explicit fashion, and the latter as both allegory and as the actual, patriarchal Law of the Politburos-in-waiting of various political cults. But those same slippages can just as easily happen in reverse when one opposes national interests and “the family” — it’s always easy to slide over the multiplicitous cultural practices that might be reified as those “things” when those “things” are of dubious value. And of course, it’s possible to mix it all up, as the ulimate in hypocrisy: before their current, international pandering to certain religious leaderships, Cliffites and other Leninoids were voting against allowing Muslim women to speak at anti-war rallies in Sydney, and branding brown people who spoke the word “Allah” in public as “fundamentalist hijackers”. The orientation changes, but the style of totalisation remains the same.
Meanwhile, the moralism of those with a vicarious investment in Third World nationalism reminds me of Michael Haneke’s film Caché, which I saw the other night. It’s quite riveting, and insistently attempts to puncture the comfortable world of bourgeois liberalism by rubbing its face in the gutter of France’s postcolonial abbatoir — a white literati family are “terrorised” by Lost Highway-style tapes of stalkery video surveillance that herald a repressed narrative related to the Algerian War of Independence. But after a while I realised that Caché is actually an appalling film, because by assuming a shared bourgeois liberalism with which one can empathise, and investing in a vicarious fantasy of “gritty reality”, it reinforces the very things it purportedly critiques. In fact, it actually unconsciously replays some of the most appalling Zionist apologetics, in which Arabs are only capable of “terrorising us with our guilt and their own victimhood”. This is what happens when you overinvest in reactive moralism as an anti-imperialist strategy: you continue to instrumentalise the big Other.
[ tags: film, lebanon, nationalism, war ]
