Saturday, May 24, 2008
Sarah Island --2 and More
La Professora calls me from the early stages of her return journey from the small Basque town in the Pyrenees; I am coming, darling. But a long grueling passage awaits her, economy class to economy class, no bed in sight for over 45 hours--to Bilbao, then Madrid, then London, then Hong Kong, then Melbourne. How many more of these trips she has left in her we do not know, but this is what it means to leave from or arrive to this continent--when Europe beckons. Journeys are on my mind as I resume my writing of our passage up the Lyell Highway, the map of Tasmania at my elbow--the yellow of towns giving way to the green of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, our destination. I have been reading "The Sarah Island Conspiracies: Being An Account of Twelve Voyages to MacQuarie Harbor and Sarah Island, 1822-1838," based on the archival account of a clerk known only as G.K. There we sat in our cosy rented car, transversing the heart of Tasmania, riding the ridge of all those other journeys, the unwanted ones forced upon desolate people and those who would be their prison masters. Van Diemen's Land where the punished were sent for deeper despair, where nations of indigenous peoples were massacred to make room for new suffering. Surely the huge monoliths of race and class are the bedrock of this nation.
Tired and stiff after four hours of driving, we were anxious to reach our destination, an accommodation in Strahan, fronting the Macquarie Harbor, but another terrain awaited us, another circle of Hell is how I think of it now--Queenstown, a town set in a valley of mining-stripped hills. Smoke drifted up the valley from the old corrugated iron worker's homes, the poverty that remains when wealth is stripped out of a land and sent elsewhere and to others. We descended through the mountain's brutal vacancies to the town itself, trying to transform its ugliness into tough quaintness--with a pastel painted abandoned train station serving as a cafe and tourist center for the stream engine ride from Queenstown to Strahan and back again. I realize I am a foreigner in this land, a land whose booming economy today rests on what can be hauled up from its depths--the iron ore, the copper, the tin, the uranium--the booming jobs and driving house-size wheels of the Kimberley region, plunging deeper and deeper into the interior that is our earth, to feed the hungers of development--too easy to say China and India--for such takings from the land have fueled us all, the seizing of minerals and the seizing of human flesh. Queenstown is a land of old wounds, of tree covered mountains turned inside out so stone greets the day. I have no ingrained appreciation for the mighty human feat of mateship that brought about this inversion, a feat that brings national pride to many--the conquering of the earth's privacy. I keep thinking of the Aboriginals' belief that the land is sacred, like so many indigenous peoples, that as it suffers so do we all and so for the most part, they live in poverty while this land that they tended for thousands of years is turned into a wealth that never reaches their townships and leaves the hills bare.
What I want to tell you about is the deep dark waters of the Gordon River, its impenetrable bush growing down to its shores, the river of platypuses and Huon Pine, the indestructible tree that called to the shipbuilders to bring their convict labor through Hells Gates. And I will but first I must leave this narrative for another. As we were waiting in the Hobart airport for our return flight, I checked my e-mail and found the New York Times announcement that R. R. Knudson had died. Zan, of the golden hair and lithe body, of the restless spirit and total dedication to her poet partner of so many years, May Swenson, had left this earth. How could this be, the poet and the tiger now both lost. The tiger was to be the care taker of the poet's work and she had done such a good job already, editing collections of May's work, always seeking out new venues for the poet's voice. I thought of my own tiger, Lee, who had introduced me to May's work and then to Zan in the flesh. Zan coming in the silence of early dawn in her red ramshackle van to get us up out of our warm Catskill mountain beds to take us bird watching, whether we so desired it or not, her fist pounding on the door, come on, come on. She and Lee sitting in the front of the moving cabin, their mutual physicality a laughing bond while I rolled around in the back trying to stay on the make shift bed, the only seat possible. Like a teenage boy, I thought but this "boy" was the muse of the poet and her own as well, having written over 40 books for adolescent girls, mostly about sports. At one point after hours of driving along meadows and jumping out to catch a glimpse of the singer of some subtle song, Lee and Zan fell into a deep discussion of whether road kill could count on the life list of a dedicated bird watcher. I had never met the poet but I had met the tiger and when Lee read to me in her Texas-Kansas twang, May's poem "Poet to Tiger," the words caught at my heart, this butch-fem ode of appreciation from such a great height such domestic encounters of desire and play.
"...Tiger don't scold me
don't make me comb my hair outdoors.
Cuff me careful. Lick don't
crunch. Make last what's yours." (May Swenson, "New and Selected Things Taking Place," 1954)
"Make last what's yours," and we could not. How can it be that the tiger slipped away, in her furtive and yet energetic way, she who kept so alive the word of her poet for the rest of us--perhaps I have been alone too much these days, but this loss cuts so close, for this bond to be broken, for play to turn into disappearance, for such a promise one to the other made with living words and bounding flesh to be so broken--there in the cold newsprint of the so worldly NY Times in an airport on the other side of the world--but I can still smell the tiger and hear the poet laugh. The poems--read the poems-- and all will come alive again.
Tired and stiff after four hours of driving, we were anxious to reach our destination, an accommodation in Strahan, fronting the Macquarie Harbor, but another terrain awaited us, another circle of Hell is how I think of it now--Queenstown, a town set in a valley of mining-stripped hills. Smoke drifted up the valley from the old corrugated iron worker's homes, the poverty that remains when wealth is stripped out of a land and sent elsewhere and to others. We descended through the mountain's brutal vacancies to the town itself, trying to transform its ugliness into tough quaintness--with a pastel painted abandoned train station serving as a cafe and tourist center for the stream engine ride from Queenstown to Strahan and back again. I realize I am a foreigner in this land, a land whose booming economy today rests on what can be hauled up from its depths--the iron ore, the copper, the tin, the uranium--the booming jobs and driving house-size wheels of the Kimberley region, plunging deeper and deeper into the interior that is our earth, to feed the hungers of development--too easy to say China and India--for such takings from the land have fueled us all, the seizing of minerals and the seizing of human flesh. Queenstown is a land of old wounds, of tree covered mountains turned inside out so stone greets the day. I have no ingrained appreciation for the mighty human feat of mateship that brought about this inversion, a feat that brings national pride to many--the conquering of the earth's privacy. I keep thinking of the Aboriginals' belief that the land is sacred, like so many indigenous peoples, that as it suffers so do we all and so for the most part, they live in poverty while this land that they tended for thousands of years is turned into a wealth that never reaches their townships and leaves the hills bare.
What I want to tell you about is the deep dark waters of the Gordon River, its impenetrable bush growing down to its shores, the river of platypuses and Huon Pine, the indestructible tree that called to the shipbuilders to bring their convict labor through Hells Gates. And I will but first I must leave this narrative for another. As we were waiting in the Hobart airport for our return flight, I checked my e-mail and found the New York Times announcement that R. R. Knudson had died. Zan, of the golden hair and lithe body, of the restless spirit and total dedication to her poet partner of so many years, May Swenson, had left this earth. How could this be, the poet and the tiger now both lost. The tiger was to be the care taker of the poet's work and she had done such a good job already, editing collections of May's work, always seeking out new venues for the poet's voice. I thought of my own tiger, Lee, who had introduced me to May's work and then to Zan in the flesh. Zan coming in the silence of early dawn in her red ramshackle van to get us up out of our warm Catskill mountain beds to take us bird watching, whether we so desired it or not, her fist pounding on the door, come on, come on. She and Lee sitting in the front of the moving cabin, their mutual physicality a laughing bond while I rolled around in the back trying to stay on the make shift bed, the only seat possible. Like a teenage boy, I thought but this "boy" was the muse of the poet and her own as well, having written over 40 books for adolescent girls, mostly about sports. At one point after hours of driving along meadows and jumping out to catch a glimpse of the singer of some subtle song, Lee and Zan fell into a deep discussion of whether road kill could count on the life list of a dedicated bird watcher. I had never met the poet but I had met the tiger and when Lee read to me in her Texas-Kansas twang, May's poem "Poet to Tiger," the words caught at my heart, this butch-fem ode of appreciation from such a great height such domestic encounters of desire and play.
"...Tiger don't scold me
don't make me comb my hair outdoors.
Cuff me careful. Lick don't
crunch. Make last what's yours." (May Swenson, "New and Selected Things Taking Place," 1954)
"Make last what's yours," and we could not. How can it be that the tiger slipped away, in her furtive and yet energetic way, she who kept so alive the word of her poet for the rest of us--perhaps I have been alone too much these days, but this loss cuts so close, for this bond to be broken, for play to turn into disappearance, for such a promise one to the other made with living words and bounding flesh to be so broken--there in the cold newsprint of the so worldly NY Times in an airport on the other side of the world--but I can still smell the tiger and hear the poet laugh. The poems--read the poems-- and all will come alive again.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sarah Island--Part 1
Here I always have new terrain, both physical and historical. For my 68th birthday and before her departure for 12 days in the Basque country of Spain, La Professora and two friends arranged a three day journey to the Macquarie Harbor region of Tasmania. We dropped Cello off the night before at Jane and Ann's where his skippergee family lives and at 5 the next morning were making our way to the airport for the hour flight to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, Australia's island state. Departures and arrivals always seem to happen in the dark of night or the softer darkness of early morning here, whether one is leaving for an hour or twenty-one hour flight. Adventure in mere movement marks this continent.
Tasmania or Van Diemens Land as it was known in the penal colony history of this land is a place of dark stories --violence marks its early days--whether the victims be Aboriginal peoples or the men, women and children of London's overcrowded ship prisons shipped as raw colonial material to the Southern hemisphere. Steal a handkerchief and Van Diemens Land becomes your prison. I knew this island was the best and worst of Australia's complex past--with the Mainlanders speaking of its inhabitants the way Manhattanites often spoke of New Jersey. If my 1999 journey to the center of Australia, to the red sacred monolith of Uluru, and the dry river bed of Alice Springs, had let me touch for a brief instant, the Aboriginal homelands of the interior desert, this journey through Hells Gates of Macquarie Harbor and our visit to the stone remnants of the penal colony of Sarah Island was to bring home to me the charged national stories of a country built on the lives of social outcasts, so harshly punished for small acts of thievery and in some instances, political resistances.
Unlike the mainland, Tasmania is a land marked by internal waterways. Our plane flies low over the mouth of the Derwent River into the bay where Hobart sits, with its pretty little bay side cottages and cleaned up fishing docks. Mitch and Rose drive us up and down the narrow streets that all seem to lead to a view of the harbor and I am reminded of small New England fishing towns, that I visited with other lovers in the 70s and 80s. Like for them, tourism now understands the appeal of the 19th century preserved housing and the need for small warm coffee shops and stores selling homegrown wool and watercolors of the Tasmanian river scapes. Then it is on our way, along the Derwent river valley highway, the sunlight beaming off the river, gold reflecting gold as the autumnal colors are mirrored in the parallel waterway. The coastal town of Strahan is our destination, but first, three hours later, we must pass through the mining moonscape of Queenstown. This is a place that scorned prettiness.
Tasmania or Van Diemens Land as it was known in the penal colony history of this land is a place of dark stories --violence marks its early days--whether the victims be Aboriginal peoples or the men, women and children of London's overcrowded ship prisons shipped as raw colonial material to the Southern hemisphere. Steal a handkerchief and Van Diemens Land becomes your prison. I knew this island was the best and worst of Australia's complex past--with the Mainlanders speaking of its inhabitants the way Manhattanites often spoke of New Jersey. If my 1999 journey to the center of Australia, to the red sacred monolith of Uluru, and the dry river bed of Alice Springs, had let me touch for a brief instant, the Aboriginal homelands of the interior desert, this journey through Hells Gates of Macquarie Harbor and our visit to the stone remnants of the penal colony of Sarah Island was to bring home to me the charged national stories of a country built on the lives of social outcasts, so harshly punished for small acts of thievery and in some instances, political resistances.
Unlike the mainland, Tasmania is a land marked by internal waterways. Our plane flies low over the mouth of the Derwent River into the bay where Hobart sits, with its pretty little bay side cottages and cleaned up fishing docks. Mitch and Rose drive us up and down the narrow streets that all seem to lead to a view of the harbor and I am reminded of small New England fishing towns, that I visited with other lovers in the 70s and 80s. Like for them, tourism now understands the appeal of the 19th century preserved housing and the need for small warm coffee shops and stores selling homegrown wool and watercolors of the Tasmanian river scapes. Then it is on our way, along the Derwent river valley highway, the sunlight beaming off the river, gold reflecting gold as the autumnal colors are mirrored in the parallel waterway. The coastal town of Strahan is our destination, but first, three hours later, we must pass through the mining moonscape of Queenstown. This is a place that scorned prettiness.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Archives and Destiny
The rain falls on this Thursday morning--we have had the driest April in 11 years--I say "we" loosely since I am not of this history, a new comer to its weather worries, to all its national concerns. I come not as an Australian, but as a citizen of the world who has the opportunity to learn different realities of daily life--the crowing of our neighbor's chooks, the weekly rolling out of the garbage bins, garbage neatly sorted; shopping on Sydney Road, the Muslim heart of Melbourne; the resonances of other national holidays, ANZAC day with its heart on the shores of a Turkish town, where Australian "diggers," young military men, were sent to meet their death, the Queens Birthday, holidays marked by a living link to the colonial past and the always over riding concern with the level of water in the dams. I have learned to read the weather map with an Australian eye, or at least a Victorian one, to see the sweep of clouds from Adelaide swoop low over the tip and most times, pass us by on its way to Tasmania, but today, the sky stays gray, the temperature drops and rain falls. Here I live with migrant neighbors and their sometimes sad acceptance of displacement, the graying photographs on dressers of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers from the old country, looking sternly out at my neighbors, women's hair pulled tight, men with battered hats, their faces daily icons of sacrificial journeys. "What can you do?" says Anna, her hand resting on top of the low wall between us.
I have spent the last few days archiving the Women in Black papers that Marg had carefully stored in an old filing cabinet in her shed. As in other times, this handling of worn papers brings me peace when my body cannot do very much else. My knee, crushed when I was run over by a truck in 1995, gave way the other night. When morning came, Di called an ambulance and we spent the day in the Epworth emergency room--the knee gave way in the middle of the night as I made my way to the bathroom and I thought, I have entered the time of life when the body has its own conversations with the night, and you wait for sunlight to bring the hope of strategies of repair--so now I sit and have my work to do, to bring honor to the women who since the late 1980s organized campaigns for Women In Black, who stood vigil and wrote petitions and questioned members of parliament. Seven folders of documents to be inventoried, described, touched and then, a reunion of these women and they will see the markings of their refusal of destinies. That is how I see the archives of those who fall below the gaze of national powers--the queers, the peace makers, the migrants, the workers--the refusal of destinies. Women in Black has attempted to intervene in the militaristic policies of over 50 countries, and it all began in Haifa in 1988--Jewish and Palestinian women refusing the destiny of occupation. Nations spend millions of dollars on their war museums, on Presidential archives, on the historical collections of the forces of national power. Then I come to these pieces of paper, some with the hurriedly written notes of a meeting, with list of questions to be asked, the flyers handed out in the streets of Melbourne, of Sydney, flyers from Tel Aviv with the names of Palestinian women arrested by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1991 who desperately need help for their children, for their families. These papers tell another story, delineate a different way to live in the world, announce that preserved memory of difference made visible is a lasting denial of destiny--there will always be war, they say and build temples to its Gods. There was no other way, they say. Believe what we tell you, they say. Hate who the nation hates, they say. This is the only way to be a citizen, to be a woman, to be a Jew. Oh, but the riches of resistance lie in the archives. I know that some women involved in Women in Black read this journal and I hope you will think about archiving, collecting, listing, all the markings of your involvement. Perhaps eventually there can be an international archives of Women in Black. Write me if you want to talk about this. Some times these days, it seems as if the forces of everlasting war have won the world, but our markings will be found by those who need them, our imagination of refusals.
30 April 2008
Dear Friends,
I received this message from International Women in Black. Elana is a great woman I met at the Women in Black Conference in Jerusalem--her comments are in italics and I am sending them as I received them. She is living in Jaffa, Israel.
...from Paula, Women in Black (Vienna)
Raided--Hebron Girls Orphange Sewing Workshop
Hebron: At 1:00 am this morning, April 30th, the Israeli Military raided the Hebron Girls' orphanage near the intersection of Salaam and Al Adel (Peace and Justice) Streets. Acting on orders issued by Major General Shemni, soldiers looted the workshop of all its sewing and processing machines, office equipment, rolls of cloth, finished clothing and supplies. CPT members documented, with still photos and video, approximately 40 Israeli soldiers emptying the workshop contents into 2 40 ft trucks. The estimated value of the physical material taken is $45,000 US. The cost in terms of the fear and terror instilled in the hearts of the little girls living above the workshop is much higher. How I hope the international community will finally take note of this enough to act against Major General Shemni (or whatever his name actually is) and those who agreed to participate in this abomination. Isn't it time for everyone to take a stand and choose more realistic sides? Either this kind of act is acceptable OR IT IS NOT! FOR SHAME! Please do what you can to support the children and raise your voice against this invasion. Elana)
You know, it will matter who said no, it will matter who risked homes of all sorts because they could no longer live with the abuses of power and the breaking of our human hearts.
I have spent the last few days archiving the Women in Black papers that Marg had carefully stored in an old filing cabinet in her shed. As in other times, this handling of worn papers brings me peace when my body cannot do very much else. My knee, crushed when I was run over by a truck in 1995, gave way the other night. When morning came, Di called an ambulance and we spent the day in the Epworth emergency room--the knee gave way in the middle of the night as I made my way to the bathroom and I thought, I have entered the time of life when the body has its own conversations with the night, and you wait for sunlight to bring the hope of strategies of repair--so now I sit and have my work to do, to bring honor to the women who since the late 1980s organized campaigns for Women In Black, who stood vigil and wrote petitions and questioned members of parliament. Seven folders of documents to be inventoried, described, touched and then, a reunion of these women and they will see the markings of their refusal of destinies. That is how I see the archives of those who fall below the gaze of national powers--the queers, the peace makers, the migrants, the workers--the refusal of destinies. Women in Black has attempted to intervene in the militaristic policies of over 50 countries, and it all began in Haifa in 1988--Jewish and Palestinian women refusing the destiny of occupation. Nations spend millions of dollars on their war museums, on Presidential archives, on the historical collections of the forces of national power. Then I come to these pieces of paper, some with the hurriedly written notes of a meeting, with list of questions to be asked, the flyers handed out in the streets of Melbourne, of Sydney, flyers from Tel Aviv with the names of Palestinian women arrested by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1991 who desperately need help for their children, for their families. These papers tell another story, delineate a different way to live in the world, announce that preserved memory of difference made visible is a lasting denial of destiny--there will always be war, they say and build temples to its Gods. There was no other way, they say. Believe what we tell you, they say. Hate who the nation hates, they say. This is the only way to be a citizen, to be a woman, to be a Jew. Oh, but the riches of resistance lie in the archives. I know that some women involved in Women in Black read this journal and I hope you will think about archiving, collecting, listing, all the markings of your involvement. Perhaps eventually there can be an international archives of Women in Black. Write me if you want to talk about this. Some times these days, it seems as if the forces of everlasting war have won the world, but our markings will be found by those who need them, our imagination of refusals.
30 April 2008
Dear Friends,
I received this message from International Women in Black. Elana is a great woman I met at the Women in Black Conference in Jerusalem--her comments are in italics and I am sending them as I received them. She is living in Jaffa, Israel.
...from Paula, Women in Black (Vienna)
Raided--Hebron Girls Orphange Sewing Workshop
Hebron: At 1:00 am this morning, April 30th, the Israeli Military raided the Hebron Girls' orphanage near the intersection of Salaam and Al Adel (Peace and Justice) Streets. Acting on orders issued by Major General Shemni, soldiers looted the workshop of all its sewing and processing machines, office equipment, rolls of cloth, finished clothing and supplies. CPT members documented, with still photos and video, approximately 40 Israeli soldiers emptying the workshop contents into 2 40 ft trucks. The estimated value of the physical material taken is $45,000 US. The cost in terms of the fear and terror instilled in the hearts of the little girls living above the workshop is much higher. How I hope the international community will finally take note of this enough to act against Major General Shemni (or whatever his name actually is) and those who agreed to participate in this abomination. Isn't it time for everyone to take a stand and choose more realistic sides? Either this kind of act is acceptable OR IT IS NOT! FOR SHAME! Please do what you can to support the children and raise your voice against this invasion. Elana)
You know, it will matter who said no, it will matter who risked homes of all sorts because they could no longer live with the abuses of power and the breaking of our human hearts.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
How to End the Journey
We have traveled with Dorothy Z. on her journey to Palestine and Israel and now she takes leave of that journey.
My Final Report...
"Hello, all--I wanted to send my final report of my recent trip to Israel/Palestine sooner then this, but the truth is that I was rather upset after I got back and it has taken me a month to distill my thoughts. I want t stress here that the trip was fascinating and I so admired the people in I/P who are doing SOMETHING, no matter on what level. Please keep this in mind as I continue:
The last day of the trip was the most upsetting for me. Two events. First: on our way to the airport we stopped off and saw a grantee in Lod. Opposite her office was a city-funded community center whose playground, we were told, was for Israeli Jewish children only, and that our informant had personally seen Palestinian children--that is, Arabs, children of Palestinian Israeli citizens--standing forlornly outside the locked gate of the playground unable to get in. I was so shocked that I actually shouted, "WHAT?" She explained that the community center was funded by the Absorption Ministry and served Ethiopian children and Russian children only and that city officials told her there wasn't enough money to hire the necessary staff to supervise a larger group of children, i.e. not enough money to include Arab children. So there we were, watching mostly Ethiopian children and a few Russian children playing, running, in our eyes an interracial group, but there were no Palestinian children playing. Mississippi or Lod? No Arabs need apply.
If this was not bad enough, we were again searched by 10 people in the Ben Gurion Airport (please note that we had already successfully passed through the x-ray machines), I had to remove my bra so that it could be thoroughly checked by hand (I am told this means I am now among the officially strip searched), it took again almost 3 hours with no answers to our many questions about why we were being searched, what was happening, etc. What's the problem, I asked over and over again. The 25-year old searcher said, "I have my orders." The fact that I am Jewish myself, that this occurred in a Jewish country and that we were being searched by a Jewish security person who said he had his "orders" without any comprehension on his part about the echoes of history, the ramifications of his remark--all of this was, as I said, excruciating. In fact, it has taken me exactly one month to fully get over it, if I ever get over it."
Onward,
Dorothy
I had not realized that our short, only 12 day visit, to Israel, to our friends in Haifa, now almost a year ago, would focus my thinking so completely. Not in the way so many report back, not because I was finally in a Jewish homeland, but because I was in a land where broken histories lay every where, even in the places seen as victories. The huge King David Hotel in Jerusalem
once bathed in the blood of British officials, blown to pieces by the Israeli "freedom fighters," seemed so sad to me--its opulence, its promise of we are the West, we are the property owners here, was so blind in its marble whiteness. Such a short distance away lies the West Bank, a mere green line away, here the roads are clogged with traffic, with throngs of too many people in too small a space, we slow down and I look out at a group of Palestinian children waiting enthusiastically for the old man with the Pomegranate juice vessel strapped to his back so as he bends over his head pours out the rich red sweetness of the fruit of his land. How ownership falls before the eyes of yearning children. But when history grabbed me in its talons was as I stood in the Palestinian neighborhood of Haifa, that which has been allowed to remain, I stood still looking up into the hot sky at the stone houses with their insides hanging over the street, Hannah explained that the dwellers seldom got permission to add on much needed rooms so living rooms hung on crumbling balconies, beds jutted out over the street , marooned on cement buttresses. I felt a vertigo, I was standing still but deprivation swirled around me, so mean spirited it all seemed, and then I was caught up and carried into the words I have been pouring out over all your heads. May my feet never touch the ground again, the ground of certainties, of the supremacy of one historical narrative over another, so seductive because it seems to promise home.
"Have you never noticed how testimony falters under interrogation?" (Michelle De Kretser, "The Hamilton Case," 2003)
I will write an essay for my last book called "The Crises of Memory: Archives and the Jewish Self." Now I go to work on The Women in Black Australian Archives.
My Final Report...
"Hello, all--I wanted to send my final report of my recent trip to Israel/Palestine sooner then this, but the truth is that I was rather upset after I got back and it has taken me a month to distill my thoughts. I want t stress here that the trip was fascinating and I so admired the people in I/P who are doing SOMETHING, no matter on what level. Please keep this in mind as I continue:
The last day of the trip was the most upsetting for me. Two events. First: on our way to the airport we stopped off and saw a grantee in Lod. Opposite her office was a city-funded community center whose playground, we were told, was for Israeli Jewish children only, and that our informant had personally seen Palestinian children--that is, Arabs, children of Palestinian Israeli citizens--standing forlornly outside the locked gate of the playground unable to get in. I was so shocked that I actually shouted, "WHAT?" She explained that the community center was funded by the Absorption Ministry and served Ethiopian children and Russian children only and that city officials told her there wasn't enough money to hire the necessary staff to supervise a larger group of children, i.e. not enough money to include Arab children. So there we were, watching mostly Ethiopian children and a few Russian children playing, running, in our eyes an interracial group, but there were no Palestinian children playing. Mississippi or Lod? No Arabs need apply.
If this was not bad enough, we were again searched by 10 people in the Ben Gurion Airport (please note that we had already successfully passed through the x-ray machines), I had to remove my bra so that it could be thoroughly checked by hand (I am told this means I am now among the officially strip searched), it took again almost 3 hours with no answers to our many questions about why we were being searched, what was happening, etc. What's the problem, I asked over and over again. The 25-year old searcher said, "I have my orders." The fact that I am Jewish myself, that this occurred in a Jewish country and that we were being searched by a Jewish security person who said he had his "orders" without any comprehension on his part about the echoes of history, the ramifications of his remark--all of this was, as I said, excruciating. In fact, it has taken me exactly one month to fully get over it, if I ever get over it."
Onward,
Dorothy
I had not realized that our short, only 12 day visit, to Israel, to our friends in Haifa, now almost a year ago, would focus my thinking so completely. Not in the way so many report back, not because I was finally in a Jewish homeland, but because I was in a land where broken histories lay every where, even in the places seen as victories. The huge King David Hotel in Jerusalem
once bathed in the blood of British officials, blown to pieces by the Israeli "freedom fighters," seemed so sad to me--its opulence, its promise of we are the West, we are the property owners here, was so blind in its marble whiteness. Such a short distance away lies the West Bank, a mere green line away, here the roads are clogged with traffic, with throngs of too many people in too small a space, we slow down and I look out at a group of Palestinian children waiting enthusiastically for the old man with the Pomegranate juice vessel strapped to his back so as he bends over his head pours out the rich red sweetness of the fruit of his land. How ownership falls before the eyes of yearning children. But when history grabbed me in its talons was as I stood in the Palestinian neighborhood of Haifa, that which has been allowed to remain, I stood still looking up into the hot sky at the stone houses with their insides hanging over the street, Hannah explained that the dwellers seldom got permission to add on much needed rooms so living rooms hung on crumbling balconies, beds jutted out over the street , marooned on cement buttresses. I felt a vertigo, I was standing still but deprivation swirled around me, so mean spirited it all seemed, and then I was caught up and carried into the words I have been pouring out over all your heads. May my feet never touch the ground again, the ground of certainties, of the supremacy of one historical narrative over another, so seductive because it seems to promise home.
"Have you never noticed how testimony falters under interrogation?" (Michelle De Kretser, "The Hamilton Case," 2003)
I will write an essay for my last book called "The Crises of Memory: Archives and the Jewish Self." Now I go to work on The Women in Black Australian Archives.
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