Sinan Antoon reads at the Ottoman Court

No matter how much a place has been written about, there’s always a value in seeing it for yourself. It’s an inherently personal experience that comes only with having set foot there. It creates a feeling and a memory, sometimes shared by a few intimate others who too were present, but each knowing the feeling differently. When an experience is captured in words and still manages to resonate with those who were never even there — when we empathize with the experience — the impact becomes hard to contain.

I’ve returned from traveling to the eighth Palestine Festival of Literature (‘Palfest’) this weekend, a bout of food poisoning on the way back to London perhaps making my subsequent introspection a little unpredictable. Palfest is a more unusual literary festival in that guest writers commit to an intensive week-long visit across Historic Palestine. Foreign authors, poets, and members of the literary community come to learn about life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank by day, and by night they share a stage with Palestinian colleagues, reading excerpts of work to audiences in Palestinian cities.

Palfest deliberately takes its foreign guests through some of the motions of Israel’s occupation designed to disempower Palestinian life and deter resistance. Crossing the Allenby bridge from Jordan to Jerusalem is how the week began for many of us. Our group, harboring esteemed and even Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, was met with suspicion at Israeli border control, which is now staffed by private security contractors. Two young female contractors seemed to reckon we were collaborating with something that undermines the state of Israel. Luckily they couldn’t manage to put their fingers on it before the terminal is due to close, so after a total of six hours we completed the crossing as a group. This movement, like many others throughout the West Bank, can be completed with privilege — foreign passports are afforded a greater level of care, perhaps in order to keep Israel’s international image intact.

Day-to-day, the group traveled and met with individuals actively contributing to the movement of nonviolent resistance. We learned of steadfast responses to colonialism and apartheid rooted in protecting Palestinian rights, history and cultural heritage. With each movement through checkpoints, along privileged “settler only” roads or next to the apartheid wall, the group gathered fragments of a story of oppression and violence, expulsion and dispossession, detention, cultural appropriation and foreign exploitation. But surely life under the world’s longest military occupation should be no great mystery to the well-read foreign audience?

Palfest Opening Night in Ramallah

Tonight, I listened to news of the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, a care home where young boys were routinely sexually abused between 1960 and 1980. There have long been claims that visitors to the home included members of the occupying British military, politicians and civil servants and that Thatcher’s government and the MI5 relentlessly blocked investigations in order to ‘secure intelligence’. Throughout this time whistleblowers tirelessly tried to expose the truth, writing letters to places of power; nothing was ever done to stop it.

What makes it harder to listen to the voices of those being oppressed? Do we really need to have seen it for ourselves to believe it?

Omar Barghouti, addressing the group in Ramallah as the festival drew to a close, spoke about the kind of resistance that Israel cannot meet with firepower — knowledge. Beyond the knowledge of facts there is the language of art and literature that has the power to liberate each of us from within.

Each year the Palestine Festival of Literature brings together voices capable of reaching and resonating with those who were never even there. All that is ever required of the audience is to be able to, just for a moment, place oneself in another’s shoes.

Author Richard Ford, speaking in Ramallah as both the night and the festival closed, recalled the words of his late friend, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in ‘Digging’. He wrote:

‘Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.’

Once more reminding us that literature can provide the means to reach people where facts fail to.

Here’s a full list of writers involved in the festival.
Photos by Rob Stothard


 
 
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