Adorno once famously said that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In a letter, Celan lamented on neo-Nazism in Germany after the war and wrote: "some of them even write poems. These men, they write poems! What all don't they write, the liars."
Reading this, very naively I think of all that these sensitive souls had to endure in a supposedly fascism purged society and yet face anti-semitism daily, in all it's obvious and less obvious forms.
Today, one thinks about the cultural racism that Muslims face in Euro-America, almost on a daily basis, in all it's obvious and less obvious forms and yet the perpetrators as Celan would have noted, are liars, they write poems. It seems inevitable that almost all nations and people have their blind spots which are quite noticeable to the those on the outside. In the aftermath of the foundation of the Zionist state of Israel and it's subsequent atrocities against the Palestinians and it's Arab neighbours, including atrocities of a political, human and military nature, these atrocities are almost lost on all Jewish writers, academics and Philosophers except a handful, so much so that the Palestinian catastrophe, properly called nakba, is lost on what Celan should have perhaps noticed as well. We must say that all those who don't recognise these criminal acts against the Palestinians are liars and they write poetry!
In it's present manifestation, the racism and the anti-Islamic stance adopted by those write the narratives of Euro-America are liable to be declared as liars too, and as Celan wrote, only true hands write true poems. It is to be seen that the blatant rejection of the Palestinian nakba can be seen as something that was ignored by all Jewish writers with exception and something which Celan like sufferers could not even point out. Nowadays in Europe on the whole, the politics of the day that revels in banning articles of clothing like the burqa are engaging in a kind of feminist politics that uses this feminist diatribe and perpetuates and reinforces this Muslim-phobic and cultural racism that raises wall after wall against immigrant Muslims on Euro-America and is pushing, day after day, these immigrants into a state, where after the next fifty years perhaps, the new holocausts could begin all over again.
While outwardly these immigrant populations seemingly have certain modicums of freedom and access to instruments of equality which languish in stolid disrepair in their original countries, yet, alas yet, there are clearly as Celan said:
Whichever stone you lift-/ you lay bare/ those who need the protection of stones.
Saturday, October 02, 2010
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