antipopper

Our Suad Amiry event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival was awesome — I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of such a generous, warmly ironic storyteller — the amazing one-liners were so plentiful that I was overwhelmed. I’ll have to go through the audio to transcribe the best bits. Bringing Amiry to Australia was the best fucking idea I’ve had in a long time!

Some time ago Anne Galloway dropped a challenge:

as much as I love cultural theories of everyday life, I’m sure they’d be stronger if they included the voices of, say, people living in Occupied Palestine — where urgency and joy take on new meaning.

But is the answer a matter of an implicitly still-Eurocentric body of “theory” “including” the marginal? Amiry’s talk, and her subsequent on-stage conversation with the luminous Rawan Abdul-Nabi, were all about autonomously elaborating the mundanities and extremities of the occupation, and I began wondering whether the canonicity of “cultural theory” was effectively being routed around and reconstituted. A few years ago I invited Rawan, then a teenager, to facilitate a discussion within an anti-racist activist network about how local struggles in suburban Sydney could find useful resonance, despite the incommensurabilities, in the everyday experience of repression and resistance in Palestine. I don’t think any of us were engaged enough for any real dialogue to emerge at the time, but last night I think my hopes for that earlier, aborted event were fulfilled by Rawan, who drew out Amiry’s stories of ridiculous, daily humiliations and their defiant circumvention through irony and humour. It was these stories and their ethics of the “neveryday”, rather than Amiry’s debatable thoughts on statecraft, that challenged me the most.

[ tags: delusions-of-grandeur, megalomania, palestine, suad-amiry, sydney-writers-festival ]