Verbicide: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti resists the political language of stupidity and hate - Essay

'Palestinians are like cancer. There are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy.'

Moshe Y'alon, Israeli Chief-of-Staff

'Eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories.'

Eitan Ben Eliahu, Israeli Air Force Commander

'I believe in liquidationists.' (Assassination brigades targeting Palestinian activists).

General Meir Dagan, Head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service

Attacked by the apartheid hate-language of Israeli generals, surrounded by daily humiliation and daily death, I dream of writing a poem about lift.

But as a Palestinian against whom this language is directed, and the poet I happen to be, how gruelling and intricate it is to write the poetry I dream of. For whoever fights monsters, as Nietzsche put it, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

I was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, on the eastern hills of Palestine. In childhood I came to see some Palestinians whose accents were different from that of mine. It was obvious they had arrived from other places. They used to ask for shelter and food. It was then that I heard the word 'refugees' for the first time. I was told that they were expelled out of their homes in hundreds of coastal villages destroyed by the armed Zionist brigades that declared the State of Israel in 1948.

'Refugees?' I used to ask my father, 'Why do we call them refugees when they are Palestinians like us?'

I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassaneh and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the Israeli Defence Force's occupation of the West Bank. The pollution of language can get no more blatant than in the term West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to eastern Palestine. The west bank of a river is a geographical location--not a country, not a homeland.

The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. The occupation wanted it to be forgotten, to become extinct, to die out. The Israeli leaders, practising their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them, would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank, or call it Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether Right or Left or a combination of both, simply dropped the term 'occupied' and used The Territories! Brilliant! I am Palestinian but my homeland is The Territories! What's happening here?

By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history. The Israeli occupation imposes a double, triple, endless redefinition of the Palestinian. Call him militant, outlaw, criminal, terrorist, irrelevant, cancer, cockroach, serpent, virus--the list becomes endless. Be the one who makes the definitions. Define! Classify! Demonize! Misinform! Simplify! Stick on the label! Then send in the tanks!

Can verbicide lead to genocide? Oversimplification has always been a factor in the failure of poetry and prose--indeed, of any discourse--but when it is the dominant characteristic of the language of politicians it ends in fanaticism and fundamentalism. Coupled with invincible superiority and a sense of sanctity, simplification might be, as history teaches us, a recipe for fascism. That's why the rhetoric of them/we and either with us or with evil is not just irresponsible jargon--but an act of war.

And what about writing and writers in our times? What can I do with my poetry and my own language here and now, in my part of the world? For decades, Palestine has been pushed to the edge of history, the edge of hope and the edge of despair, present and absent, reachable and unreachable, fearful and afraid. This Palestine is my identity, this Palestine is the absence of my identity; my imposed memory and my imposed oblivion. My telephone notebook is almost half-filled with the telephone numbers of my absent friends and neighbours and relatives whom I will not be able to call again, ever. But for reasons not clear to my heart, I won't remove their names and numbers from my notebook. Nature, old age, illness or traffic accidents: these are not the most common causes of Palestinian death.

Death has made us his family. Death has earned a residence permit among us. 'He haunts us day and night and looks into our faces wherever we go. Death lives normally among us in a country that requires every one of its citizens to remember everything all the time and to forget everything all the time and, what is more cruel and inhuman, to be heroes all the time.