The Message, page 9
All this I brought to bear, at length, in an essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” As I wrote, I could feel it flowing through me—all the study of language, all the reading, all the reporting—all of it coming together in what felt to me like a dissertation with an audience of one. That sounds crazy, I know. But in the months before the article was published, I felt that I had at last discovered the answer to the haunting question of why my people so reliably settled at the bottom of nearly every socioeconomic indicator. The answer was simple: The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder. I was blessed with a gift, and the gift was not simply the knowledge that “they” were lying (about us, about this country, and about themselves) but the proof—studies, monographs, and my own reporting. And I had an institution that vouched for the validity of this exercise, which put its weight and clout behind it. I guess it’s odd for me, who preaches the power of writing, to tell you this, but I was shocked by everything that came of that union. I had set my sights relatively low—to synthesize the scholarship and journalism in some dynamic and gripping fashion, to “make political writing into an art,” as Orwell had implored, so that the idea of reparations, the notion that we had been robbed and must be repaid, would no longer be so easily laughed at by the robbers. Maybe that was my mistake.
Making a charge according to the law of those you indict is a dangerous business. However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories. The need is even greater when you are a stranger to them, an adversary even, because your claims are always viewed with more skepticism. I lived in a world of white editors and white writers. I respected and admired many of them professionally and considered some of them friends. This was mutual, and there were very few places that I felt were more open to my resourcing and cultivating my writing and imagination than The Atlantic. I think now I felt grateful even to have the chance to publish what I considered so radical a proposition on the cover of such a hallowed and lauded magazine. But I also felt that I was attempting to display the truth and gravity of the debt of white supremacy for people who did not understand intuitively, and who would have great difficulty ever imagining that debt being repaid. And so to make the case, I reached for the same story invoked by Yad Vashem—the perfect circle, from Holocaust to state—and Germany’s efforts to pay off its own inconceivable debt by making reparations to the state of Israel.
I had then a vague notion of Israel as a country that was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people, though I was not clear on exactly what. And I knew there was a long history of alliances between Palestinian freedom fighters and the radical Black activists to whom I traced my own roots. I remember watching World News Tonight with my father, and deriving from him a dull sense that the Israelis were “white” and the Palestinians were “Black,” which is to say that the former were the oppressors and the latter the oppressed. And once—back when I dreamed of being a poet—my father had handed me a book by the Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad titled Born Palestinian, Born Black, and this combination felt natural to me, though I could not have then articulated why.
What I had was a human instinct that a grave injustice was being imposed on the Palestinians, one that likely dates back to the vindicationist skepticism of America and what I perceived as whiteness. But I became a journalist just at the moment that I began to feel both vindicationism and a politics of instinct as incomplete. So I was proud of “The Case for Reparations” because it did rely on instinct but was a synthesis of facts. It was crafted in the mold of the (mostly white) magazine writers I’d admired. They were courageous reporters and masters at taking in many streams of that reporting and turning it into a coherent and gripping narrative. Quite a few of them wrote about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” and from their writing I derived a sense that comprehension of “conflict” was a matter of knowledge, not morality. And that knowledge was as foreign to me as computational mathematics. To that was added my steady diet of beat reports, Sunday talk shows, and loose conversation, all of which validated the apparent complexity over the “conflict.” But even amid that complexity there was a certain incontestable narrative punctuated by platitudes that assumed an air of indisputable truth: Israel was a “Jewish democracy,” indeed “the only democracy in the Middle East,” one with both “the right to exist” and “the right to defend itself.”
I had staked my writing largely against exactly these sorts of easy bromides and national fictions. And I’d been richly rewarded and well honored for that work. But the year I wrote “The Case for Reparations” was the same year I applied for my first adult passport. My work was as local as it was lauded—and somewhere in my mind, I was still a college dropout, still “Ta-Nehisi was restless today” written in lipstick red. I felt the great hand of luck in my life, and I was now, miraculously, surrounded by people who knew real things about the world—journalists who had covered civil wars and had been evacuated from war zones and knew the correct use of words like “internecine” and “sectarian.” I felt my deep ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders and, with that, a deep shame.
But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.
* * *
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Halfway through my trip, I joined my group of writers for a hike up to the top of a hill just outside of Ramallah. The sun blazed above while briars attacked from below. But whatever the assault of nature, I was relieved to feel myself beyond the walls, strictures, and devices of humans. Our destination was Sakiya—an ecological retreat where a collective of Palestinians were reimagining their relationship with this precious land, which certain forces seemed determined to rip right out from under them. And it is precious—two of the houses here are from the Ottoman period and the British mandate, respectively, and there is a shrine dating back to the twelfth century. In 1937, the site was purchased from a farming family by Daoud Zalatimo, the Palestinian artist and educator. Zalatimo would host his family here for three months in the summer, and drew inspiration from the site’s vistas. In one of his paintings, his young son, Ibrahim, is seated in a red toy car, looking out placidly, a verdant garden blooming in the background. Contemplating this work, the art historian John Halaka wondered, “Why does this unassuming painting feel like a ghost haunting me?” In 1948, as Palestinians were being driven from their land, Zalatimo sheltered his family on his estate. And then, in 1967, Zalatimo too was driven out by Israeli forces. He and his family were banned from returning, except for day visits. Zalatimo died in 2001.
* * *
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Our guide through the history and landscape of the site was Sahar Qawasmi, the architect and co-founder of Sakiya, with her partner, the filmmaker Nida Sinnokrot. Sahar was born in Kuwait, but her family is from Palestine—Ramallah, Hebron, Jordan. During the Second Intifada, as Palestinians battled Israeli occupation and cities like Hebron became combat zones, the Israeli Defense Forces expanded its network of checkpoints and enforced a curfew. Feeling imprisoned, Sahar, then a student at nearby Birzeit University, began exploring the hills around Ramallah with friends. During one of these walks, Sahar found the Zalatimo estate, which had not been lived in since 1967, though the property was still in the family. There was trash everywhere. Vandals had ripped up the property in search of valuables. Nature had taken over and there were trees growing through the floors. Nonetheless, there was “a magic about it,” Sahar told me later. Maybe it was the house built on the hill overlooking a valley. Maybe it was that the site couldn’t be reached by car, and every journey had the feel of a pilgrimage. Maybe it was the sheer vintage of the site—archaeological evidence dates back through the time of the Crusaders, the Romans, and the Canaanites. Or maybe it was the water—a natural spring still in its traditional form. Whatever it was, it left Sahar with a feeling of “holiness.” She and Nida founded Sakiya in 2016 and they have been trying to preserve that holiness ever since.
* * *
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The effort was constant. We stopped halfway up the hill and beheld a Greek strawberry tree, its great brownish-red branches spraying out like a hydra’s head. It was magnificent, and for a moment we just stared at this beautiful thing. Then Sahar directed our attention to the glyphs carved in its trunk: the calling card of a local Israeli militia. Sahar explained that these militiamen come as the feeling strikes them, vandalizing the land they believe to be their homeland, given to them by God. One night, Sahar and Nida were awakened by noises. They thought it might be a group of kids, but then the noises got louder, and when they went outside they saw that their house was surrounded by twenty or so settlers. The settlers ran when they saw Nida. But they had already done their work—tools had been stolen, an oven destroyed, fish killed. Later, when I asked Sahar how she and Nida live with this constant threat to property and safety, she said:
It is a precarious life. At the same time, there is a strong will to stay and keep working. There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live. It’s a mode of survival. This is how you live on the land. We will keep going back, building the things they keep destroying.
We walked on, until we had completed our own pilgrimage and reached the top of the hill. The sky was wide open, with wisps of clouds floating by. A herd of goats slowly made its way past us, and we watched as a worker trained his attention on one particular goat lying on the ground. It was in labor. The group of my fellow writers circled the goat at a respectful distance and watched in amazement as the worker midwifed two kids slathered in the yellow goo of new life. Slightly amazed, we walked inside one of the buildings, where I broke away and wandered off on my own. I found myself in a bedroom where I had been told artists are sometimes welcome to spend a residency. I sat down on the fold-out couch and for ten minutes conducted a residency of my own. Outside I heard the goats bleating and my comrades in conversation.
I thought back to our tour of Lydd, a city inside the borders of Israel where in 1948 the nascent Israeli Defense Forces massacred a group of Palestinians by, among other means, tossing grenades into a mosque. Our guide there, Umar al-Ghubari, was concerned with the story of the massacre and was also interested that it ran counter to Israel’s own noble creation myth. The import of this counternarrative, of Palestinian vindicationism, became clear once we reached the site of the massacre. We stood on a traffic island across from the mosque, as our guide narrated the events, citing the words of the Israeli soldiers themselves. I looked over and saw an Israeli man in dark glasses standing off to the side of our little group. I knew he was Israeli only because of how he glared at our guide as he recited the history of the site. At first, I had the same semi-shocked reaction I have back home when those in power so violently object to words. It seemed absurd. Umar did not have any guns or knives. And he was standing on land firmly under Israel’s rule. Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said.
That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.
Within days of publishing “The Case for Reparations,” I began to feel the mistake. But it took years for the depth of that mistake, and thus my own debt, to compound. I felt it acutely atop that hill, and the mistake was far deeper than merely selecting the wrong model. My case for reparations was built on a chain of cases stretching back through James Forman, Queen Mother Moore, and Callie House, all the way back to Belinda Royall at the very founding of the United States. In this sense, the case was not even mine; it was ancestral. And its target was one of the world’s most malevolent inventions—racialized slavery and everything that flowed from it. Ancestors are important to me—they live on for me, not as ghosts but through words. Very often, before I sit down to write, I read back through those words—through slave narratives, letters from freedmen, memoirs, or poems. I read the words aloud like an incantation: “Dear Dangerfield you cannot imagine how much I want to see you. Come as soon as you can…” “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife…” “I would much rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a letter from you it tears me all to pieces…” And I feel a portion of what they felt—a portion of their love, rage, hope, despair—and that portion is the power I try to convey in my own writing. I am not alone. I am in a tradition.
All that week I listened to Palestinians invoking that tradition, invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own struggle to them. And then each night, the festival’s guests gathered for a reading or talk with local Palestinian writers and intellectuals. One night I sat in the audience and was shocked to see a Palestinian writer named Bekriah Mawasi quote one of my books on a panel. In that moment, I felt the warmth of solidarity, of “conquered peoples,” as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience. But as warm as that felt, I also knew that in meeting across the chasm, one of us had reached further than the other. I am a writer and a bearer of a tradition, a writer and a steward. And what I felt sitting there on top of that hill, in residency with myself, was that if my writing had soared, my stewardship had faltered.
* * *
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The next morning I left the festival and made my way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. I had to wait an extra hour or so for a taxi with the right color license plate, yellow, and so be allowed to cross through a checkpoint in Israel’s wall and onto the road to Jerusalem on the other side. I made small talk with my driver, then retreated back into my thoughts of the journey so far. It was my sixth day in Palestine, but I felt like I had been here for months. The days were filled with tours, the nights with talks—even the meals felt like seminars. Some of this is just being abroad somewhere far from home. But most of it was the specificity of this place—how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.
But when the light cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived—the stories, columns, speeches, and talks presented by “willing intellectuals.” So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. Riding in that taxi toward Jerusalem, the truth of this struck me as undeniable. I’d spent most of my time in the Occupied Territories, a world of minority rule. But even in the state proper, caste reigned. Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods. Certain neighborhoods in Israel are allowed to discriminate legally against Palestinian citizens by setting “admission committees.” The committees, operating in 41 percent of all Israeli localities, are free to bar anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social and cultural fabric.” Openly racist appeals are the norm, as when Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2015 that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” For all my talk of being fooled by the language of “Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.
If the language I’d heard all my professional life had been wrong, had been deceptive even, then what was the language to describe the project I now saw? It’s true that “Jim Crow” was the first thing that came to mind, if only because “Jim Crow” is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.
But it was not just the literal meaning of “Jim Crow,” it was the feeling of the thing too. I say the words “Jim Crow” and a casket opens before me, and inside is a boy beaten out of his own humanity. I say “Jim Crow” and I see the flag of slavery waving above a state capitol. I say “Jim Crow” and I see men on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel pointing toward the shot. I say “Jim Crow” and Detroit Red turns to me and asks, “Who taught you to hate?” I say “Jim Crow” and I hear “poll tax,” “redlining,” “grandfather clause,” “whites only,” and each of these phrases conjures additional images too. But “Jim Crow” was the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself. As much as anything, my mission in Palestine was to grow new roots, to describe this new world, not as a satellite of my old world but as a world in and of itself.
