autodafe.org - Correspondence - The Isle Of Polyphemus.
http://www.autodafe.org/correspondence/carnets/soyinka.htm
Palestine notebooks
The eight Parliament writers record their impressions on the trip to
Palestine. They provide interpretations and analyses of the current
conflict.
SECOND NOTEBOOK
The Isle Of Polyphemus
by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
It was a startling image, unexpected and unsolicited but, there it was,
instantly replete. Incisive, summative, it offered itself as an irresistible
metaphor that Monday afternoon, our first full day in Ramallah, at the
checkpoint where the road had been cut, and dwellers of, and visitors
to that city were obliged to disembark from their vehicles, cross the
checkpoint on foot, and take up a different transportation on the other
side of the guttered road. A raucous, potentially explosive junction
where traders had set up an instant market, mostly in fruits, snacks
and refreshing drinks. A young man in a bizarre colourful outfit, with a
makeshift bandolier in which plastic cups were tucked for rapid
dispensation of his ware observed my fascination and offered me a
drink. I had not changed any money so I could not even afford one if I
wished - as I patiently explained to him. But that did not bother him in
the least. He had decided that I should have a drink, and he doled it
out, free of charge.
No, that was not the image that summed up the Israeli-Palestinian
visit for me; this was the benign face of our experience - an eager,
warm and hospitable embrace, a need above all, to connect with
outside humanity and be reassured that the world had not forgotten
this terrain of deadly attrition. The crucial image offered itself on our
way back from Bir Zeit University. Exiting Ramallah, we did what
everyone else did - disembark from our buses at the checkpoint -
deserted by Israeli soldiers, as it had become a focal point for attacks
. We negotiated the concrete blocks, crossed the deep gutter that had
been cut across the tarmac and entered taxis organised by our hosts.
On return, it was the same routine - taxis from the university campus,
cross the check-point with a human motley - workers, students,
professors, peasants, doctors, nurses, school pupils etc - walk to the
rowdy improvised motor park, there to await the buses that had
dropped us off in the first place. And that was when the telling image
was vividly enacted.
A truck arrived at the motor park and then, instead of disgorging
human beings or goods, out came a flock of dense-fleece sheep,
prodded by their keeper. We watched as the shepherd began to herd
his flock - no, not along the road but down the stone and scrub valley
that sheered off just where the road executed a deep armpit curve.
Was this a short cut acrosss to his destination, taking to country
tracks to arrive at another town or village, or did he merely wish to let
the sheep graze a little before seeking a new conveyance on the other
side? We did not remain long enough to find out. What did happen
however was that I received an instant flash - Ulysses among the
Cyclops, trapped in the cave of the one-eyed Polyphemus.
Let us recall some fabulous details of that adventure tale, several
aspects of which began to take on sobering parallels. Ulysses had
sought shelter for himself and his men in the cave of that
gigantesque host but, having brought them into his home,
Polyphemus proceeded to dine serially off his guests, sealing them
in with the aid of a huge boulder which all the combined strength of
the Ulysses band could not shift. Ulysses took his revenge while
Polyphemus was asleep, preparing his bid for freedom by driving a
sharpened and heated log into the single eye of their cannibal captor.
The only question that remained was - how to escape from the cave.
Now let us recollect also that Ulysses, with his usual cautious guile,
had not given his real name to his genial host but had introduced
himself as - No-man. When the fiery stake sizzled in the giant’s eye in
the dead of night and he bellowed out his pain, his fellow Cyclops ran
to his aid, demanding who or what had caused his anguish. ‘No-man
is the villain’ replied Polyphemus again and again. So his neighbours
were thoroughly disgusted, advised him to seek a cure for his
nightmares and retreated to their own caves. If no man is tormenting
you, they cursed, why do you disturb our sleep?
Came dawn, Ulysses and his rovers remained sealed within the
cave, waiting for Polyphemus to roll aside the rock, which he was
obliged to do in order to let his sheep out to graze. But the pain-crazed
giant still had enough wit left to open the cave just wide enough for
the sheep to exit singly, sweeping any spare space with his vast
hands and over each sheep to ensure that no one was riding on its
back. Wily Ulysses had of course tied his men under the belly of each
animal. Polyphemus caressed his woolly companions, whispered
endearments to them, but missed his quarry to the last man. So far,
so instructive? Now we come to the even more dangerous part.
Once seaborne, Ulysses could not resist taunting his foe, screaming
abuses at the giant. In a fury of the thwarted, Polyphemus flung huge
lumps of rock in the direction of that needling voice, setting off a virtual
tidal wave that nearly succeeded in swamping his tormentors. Too
late. The bird had flown. Ulysses - had he so chosen - could have
returned and stung the blinded Polyphemus again and again. And
Polyphemus would uproot all the rocks - a prominent feature of
Palestinian terrain, dazzling white - and fling them blindly in the
direction of his assailant, miss him completely but provoke one
deluge after another that would threaten to innundate the world and
drown all its innocent inhabitants.
The facelessness of No-man - so many of them, and of all ages and
both sexes - is what enrages the government of Israel, and its current
leader, for whom the evocation of the figure of Polyphemus - even
physically - could not be more apt. In the process of exacting
vengeance on its enemy, it has adopted tactics that will either set off a
tidal wave to drown the world or, more aptly, set it on fire. Unable to
identify and strike pre-emptively at its elusive enemy, but determined
to identify a target, focus the attention of the world on that target, place
a name and a face on the invisible body of Satan, Ariel Sharon has
chosen to obssess himself with the merely plausible but, in truth,
merely convenient and reductionist identity - Yasser Arafat - which is
why failure is being dressed up as reason and frustration as factual
knowledge. We know who our tormentor is, shouts Sharon, echoed
by the government of the United States, and it is none other than
Yasser Arafat.
Arafat! Arafat! Arafat! Long before there was the likelihood of my
venturing near the cave of Polyphemus, I had found myself shaken to
the foundations of reason that anyone with the slightest intelligence,
with even a minimal grasp of the psychology of humiliation and
desperation, could exhibit such inanity as to imagine that, within the
context of the Middle East conflict, any one individual, no matter how
highly respected by his followers, how sacrosant his authority, could
control a form of action that stemmed out of both collective and
individual desperation and trauma. And of course Yasser Arafat is
simply not in control of the many arms the Palestinian resistance. Not
even the various groups can boast absolute control over individual
acts of determination and resourcefulness. Timothy MacVeigh took
over two hundred souls down in one fell swoop. No one has
attempted to heap on the President of the pro-gun lobby the sole
responsibility for MacVeigh’s homicidal resolve to avenge the victims
of Waco.
Nor indeed - and this I had cause to point out on a number of
occasions during our visit - nor did anyone hold the Prime Minister of
Israel responsible for the action, many years ago, of the military
reservist, a medical doctor, who opened fire on a congregation of
Moslem worshippers in a mosque, killing a score or more before
turning the gun on himself. The irrationalities of the Israeli
government and the United States have been mind-boggling - they
would be ludicrous if they were not fraught with such predictable
tragic consequences. Their insistence for instance, at the early
stages of the recent intifada, that the Palestinians observe at least a
week of violence-free moratorium before peace talks could begin,
was surely apparent to all beings with a claim to reasoning - except
those two world leaders - as a demand of unbelievable infantilism,
long before Sharon recognised and acknowledged its futility. What my
brief stay among ordinary Palestinians did was simply to compel me
to revisit that, and allied policy statements by the Israeli government,
promoted with such galling insensitivity by the United States
government. If I took anything away from our visit, personally, it was
the intensification of my private terror that so much critical
interventionism in world affairs actually rests in the hands of such
leaders with limitless military power.
No, there was no revelation, not for me. Months ago, in an article in
ENCARTA AFRICANA, I used the expression that the Israeli
government was tearing out the heart and liver of Arafat and feeding
them to his children - and who could fail to predict the consequences
of such evisceration! What I obtained last week was a reinforcement
of what had been a source of marvel, and it made me truly afraid for
the Israeli - that many of those who ever believed that their political
leader was treading the right political path had simply never taken the
trouble to project their minds into the refugee camps of the
Palestinians, into their daily existence, even if they could not visit the
physical reality, experience at first hand the daily humiliation and the
scars of memory that fully spell out the condition of nearly all
Palestinians today.
We saw the checkpoints through which thousands of Palestinian
Arabs pass in order to go to work daily at their sole economic source -
Israel. We were trapped within endless motor convoys through which
Palestinians pass daily to and from work - that is, twice a day. Those
convoys reminded me of my own country, Nigeria, between the first
military coup and the Biafran Civil War, and its immediate aftermath. It
recalled the faces of despair, resignation, but also the simmering
anger of a populace that faced daily humiliation at the hands of an
arrogant military. This sense of humiliation in Palestine was just as
palpable - you could touch it, measure it and weigh it. It found
expression in numerous ways - from the ordinary people in the
streets, men, women and children, to university lecturers and
students, NGOs , writers and civil leaders. It was affirmed by
foreigners who were compelled to share the lives of the Palestinians,
including the staff of the United Nations refugee organisation,
UNRWA. Numerous were the accounts of women who gave birth at
checkpoints because of the inflexible control that was exercised over
the movements of ordinary people, of deaths that occurred right within
ambulances that were trapped in convoys or at checkpoints. And of
course we crunched mortar beneath our feet, picked our way through
the rubble of demolished houses and saw, without any varnishing,
the active policy of land encroachment by settlers - demolish, create a
no-man’s land, then move into the vacated space when the
Palestinian occupants had been harassed beyond the range of guns.
These instances of dispossession, and their chilling methodology,
have been meticulously recorded by UN agencies, foreign
embassies and external visitors. The evidence itself was
overwhelming, indisputable.
Was I sufficiently detached during this visit? Of course. And then
again, of course not. It is not possible to take only a clinical, objective
view of the situation in Palestine. When human beings are being
blown up in restaurants, in hotels, and especially with a singularly
grotesque sense of timing - while sitting down to a holy feast, such as
the Passover - one experiences both rage and horror at the
perpetrators. Matyrdom is an abuse of the word when allied to the
murder of innocents. If there are no innocents in any struggle, then let
us give up the cause of humanity. My skin crawls whenever I hear the
expression ‘matyrdom’ used as an equivalent of murder by suicide,
and especially mass murder. And on the other side of terror, the state
variety, to listen to a family give a graphic account of tanks crashing
through their walls at night, bringing down mortar on sleeping
members of the household, crushing innocents in their sleep, it is
equally impossible to remain viscerally disengaged or fail to be
morally assaulted. These had been homes to these innocents for
generations. Now they are being turned breeding grounds for a new
species of the biped - the dehumanised.
The devastating shock waves continue. The horrors that have
become daily diet for both contestants in this ominous conflict were
brought home to me even more drastically only two days ago - Easter
Sunday - from the comparative safety of California where I read about
the latest outrage in Tel-Aviv. The name of the street rang a bell. The
explosion appears to have taken place in a cafe on the same street
that Russell Banks (president of the IPW) and I had gone for an
‘espresso fix’ while waiting to meet Shimon Peres, having driven
directly from Gaza very early on Wednesday morning for that
appointment. It could have been that very cafe - I am still to find out. In
the meantime however, the sharp, yet wistful features of the friendly
young girl who served the coffee had leapt instantly to my retina, an
image that remains stubbornly superimposed on it. Has she become
yet another statistic of the purblind peevishness of Polyphemus?
-- For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, `Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
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