Page:The Levant - Zone of Culture or Conflict.pdf/3

El-Youssef / The Levantine Review Volume 1 Number 2 (Fall 2012) it seems that the common assumption that the Levant is evidently a zone of conflict, and worse, might remain so until doomsday, doesn’t lack justification. But is there a way to challenge such a seemingly fated and enduring assumption?

Let us mention another term, which is just as popular as Memory: Resistance, or The Resistance. This is a sacred cow in many parts of the Levant. “No voice shall rise above the voice of the Resistance!” is an oft-repeated slogan. Once a group anoints itself a representative of the “resistance,” or wraps itself in the mantle of some “resistance,” any “resistance,” it will have earned the right to do pretty much as it pleases—with impunity, as is often the case with many a “sacred” or “divine resistance” in the Levant today! So let us learn from the practitioners of “resistance” and establish our own resistance: The resistance against memory and paranoia. Indeed, what better way to resist unremitting “resistance” than to encourage forgetfulness?

But let me first emphasize two points: First, that the attitude of suspicion vis-­à-vis the “other” is peculiar to politics, or anything that is determined through politics. Secondly, that people are not necessarily enslaved to their dark memory. Indeed, whenever they can, they try to distract themselves from both memory and politics; the act of forgetfulness is not so strange to them. Indeed these two facts have encouraged me through the last two decades to challenge the assumption that the Levant is, or could only, be depicted as a zone of conflict. However, the temporary forgetfulness that I am talking about is not the same as seeking distraction from reality, or escaping reality, or being cynical.

Good art for me is that which combines pleasure with education, or simply an intelligent joke that makes one laugh and think and then laugh again. The chance to forget here is a chance to think, to discover something else, or something different, or at least to recognise the significance of something that one might have overlooked or dismissed. In other words, forgetfulness is a chance to unlearn an old lesson and learn a new one.

I enjoyed reading Larkin’s poems, but I also learned a great deal from them; they taught me many things about the English language and post-­war England, and how to distinguish between an attitude of disappointment and one of hostility, and between expressions of solidarity and appreciation, and hypocrisy and conceit. Within the Levant the moment of temporary forgetfulness might be a chance for learning how to pave the way for the imagination of peace.

People who followed the Peace Process through its visual aspect must have noticed how hesitant and reluctant participants in peace negotiations looked. Starting from the notorious Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn, peace negotiators looked as if they were doing a dirty job; something that they were undertaking out of sheer necessity and desperation. The private argument, which was often made, seemed to confirm the implication of the image on the White House lawn; “we have to be realistic—we can do nothing but negotiate ISSN: 2164-6678