Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe

216 Pages·2010·1.53 MB·English

by  Samar Attar

Debunking the Myths
of Colonization
The Arabs and Europe
Samar Attar
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For my parents who encouraged me to seek knowledge
and be an independent thinker from childhood.
For my mother, Masarrah al-Azem,
and my father Dr. Fa’iq al-Attar,
both long dead and buried in the city of Damascus.
Preface
Let us quit this Europe which talks incessantly about Man while massacring him wherever it meets him, on every corner
of its own streets, in every corner of the world. For centuries . . . in the name of a supposed ‘spiritual adventure,’ it has
been suffocating almost the whole of humanity!
1
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism).
In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdi observes “In common with many
Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge
of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England . . . . I wanted to come to
England. I couldn’t wait. And to be fair, England has done all right by me; but I find it a little
difficult to be properly grateful. I can’t escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the
result of the dream-England’s famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class,
my freak fair skin and my ‘English’ English accent. Take away any of these, and the story
would have been very different. Because of course the dream-England is no more than a
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dream.”
Rushdi’s observation sums up the love-hate relationship between the colonized and the
colonizer. It illuminates the paradoxical nature of colonialism and its horrific impact on the
psyche of the colonized. The Indian writer would not have been able to discover something
about himself and his ‘dream-England’ if he did not undertake a voyage to the ‘mother country’,
live in it and interact with its people. The results of his journey are quite mixed. On one hand,
he has forfeited his Indian identity, lost his language and the language of his ancestors; but on
the other, he thinks he has become an English writer. His new country has defended his right to
speak and write freely about Indian Muslims and Islam in his fiction in retaliation to threats
from certain Muslims and has protected him as a British citizen. For the outsider, there are
many questions to be asked. Who is this man? What is his real identity? An Indian? An
Englishman? Will the English really accept his literature as part of their own heritage in the
future? Is he under some illusion that he has been accepted because of his class, fair skin, and
English accent? His description of England as a dream destination has now drastically become
different. He awakes to the fact that other Indians are treated less than citizens in England. In a
poignant passage he refers to “a professional humorist” who asks him in all seriousness on a
live radio program why does he “object to being called a wog. He [the humorist] had always
thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. ‘I was at the zoo the other day,’ he [the
humorist] revealed, ‘and a zoo keeper told me that the wogs were best with the animals; they
stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about and the animals felt at home’” (Rushdi
18-19). Obviously, Rushdi’s England is no more that paradise of which he has dreamt. Yet, it is
now home. The Indian writer must understand the meaning of being an insider and an outsider
and come to terms with what it means to be colonized.
Debunking The Myths of Colonization explores the notion of domination, particularly that of
the mind, as seen in a selected Arabic autobiographical work and fiction. The study traces the
views of a number of Arab writers, or their fictitious characters, of England and France as
colonizing powers in the 20th century. Like Salman Rushdi, all the writers under study, have
journeyed to the countries that have once colonized their own people. But unlike Rushdi, many
of them have returned home and claimed Arabic as their language. The Palestinian writers,
however, constitute a different category. They have no country anymore. The British have
promised Palestine to the Jews as a national home. After 1948, part of historical Palestine has
become Israel, and in 1967 the Jewish state has conquered the rest of the country and
subjugated its whole population. As a result, the colonized Palestinians were either trapped in
their own colonized country within the colonizer’s territory, or scattered around the world.
Even those who have adopted Hebrew as their language for pragmatic reasons continue to
write in Arabic and to expose as much as they could the difficult relationship with their
colonizer.
The book examines Frantz Fanon’s theories concerning the relationship between colonizers
and colonized and attempts to apply these theories to modern Arabic literature.
Many Arab writers have embarked on a journey to the metropolis of their ex-colonial
masters. But the act of traveling from one place to another has not only meant a geographical
and physical movement, rather a passage from one stage, or experience, to another. In most
cases, the journey results in a discovery of self and ‘other.’ When the children of British and
French colonization, be women, or men, have journeyed to the ‘mother country.’ they already
know how to speak English, or French. They have studied their ex-colonizers’ history, or
literature and adopted it as their own. Their journey is meant to be an ascent to heaven. But in
many instances, it proves to be the opposite; i.e., a descent into the depths of hell. Due to their
encounter with English or French culture, they have written memoirs, poems, or fictions in
which they have represented themselves and the ‘other.’ But their representation differs
markedly according to their own make up as human beings, their class, education, experiences
and gender. Yet what brings them together is their love-hate relationship with the ex-colonizer.
In the case of the Palestinian writers, however, there is only bitterness and bewilderment at
Israel as a colonizing power in the 21st century, and its Jewish citizens who were once victims
in Europe but now have turned into victimizers.
On a personal note, this project on colonization has been very close to my heart. As an infant,
I have survived the French bombing of Damascus, the city of my birth. On several occasions,
my family told and retold the story of a French bomb that failed to explode in a near-by field in
the forties. I was asleep in my cot. My mother thought that we were all saved because the
farmer had watered his field early in the morning, and that the bomb got stuck in the mud! I am
no expert on bombs, or why sometime they fail to explode. But I do remember distinctly seeing
French and English soldiers near my house in Damascus. Some were standing on huge tanks;
others were walking carrying rifles. Their sight terrified me as a child. I did not understand
why they were in my city, or what they wanted from my people. There were other soldiers as
well from other countries. They were darker than the Europeans. But they were working under
the colonizers’ command. During air raids I was huddled with my family and many neighbors
in a room that had no windows in our ground floor apartment. We had no bread, or milk for
many days. This is how I opened my eyes to the outside world. From early on I understood that
there would always be a conqueror and a conquered.
When I was attending public primary school in 1948, my city was flooded with thousands of
Palestinian refugees. My parents were talking at the time about the tragedy of the Palestinians,
and how they were expelled from their country, Palestine, by thousands of Jews coming from
Europe. They put the blame squarely on England and its brutal colonial policy towards the
indigenous population. It was very hard to grow up in a city where you have an enemy next-
door intent on expanding whenever the chance occurred. I knew nothing about the world, but
war, or temporary truce.
In high school I met a Palestinian girl who was born in the city of Jaffa. She has lost
everything. Many of her relatives were killed during the 1948 war with Israel. Others were
scattered in different parts of the world. She was lucky not to end up in a refugee camp on the
outskirt of Damascus. We became very good friends. Through her I got to know other displaced
Palestinians who dreamt of nothing, but going home.
During my high school years too, the British, the French, and the Israelis attacked Egypt in
1956 Suez War. In case they were to extend their aggression to Syria, we, as students, were
mobilized to defend our country. We were all trained as fire fighters, first-aid nurses, and rifle
shooters in specific civil defense centers. The ghost of war was always haunting us. Our
enemies were the wheeler-dealers of power in the world.
As a teenager too I wrote poetry and was regularly invited to recite my poems at festivals
with the known poets of the day both in Syria and Lebanon. I still remember one particular
event in Sidon in the south of Lebanon where I shared the evening with a famous Palestinian
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poet by the name Kamal Naser in the late fifties. To my horror as an adult, I’ve heard of his
assassination by the Israelis in Beirut on April 10, 1973 when I was a professor in California.
Before leaving Damascus for good in 1965 I worked briefly at the Syrian Broadcasting
Corporation as an editor and translator of news. My colleagues were all Palestinians who
were forced to leave their country in 1948. They spoke and wrote English perfectly due to the
British mandate in Palestine. Like my Palestinian high-school friend, they too had condemned
England and its colonial policy that led to their displacement, and the establishment of a
foreign country on the ashes of their own. In the radio station too, I had met the unfortunate
Egyptian Jew and spy Ilia Cohen. He came daily to my office with his friend who was in
charge of the Latin American program. Cohen was presented to us as a Syrian expatriate and a
businessman who wished to help Syria. He hardly spoke a word. And when questioned he
would either say ‘yes’, or ‘no’. Later, I watched his trial on the Syrian television, and felt
immensely sorry for the man who migrated from Egypt to Israel, married an Iraqi Jew, and
ultimately betrayed the Arabs, his own people.
During the six- day war in 1967 Israel conquered all of historical Palestine and acquired
more Arab territories. I was studying at the time in North America. Both Canadian and
American media were celebrating the Israeli victory as their own. It was very hard for me to
believe that people could actually celebrate the subjugation of other people, or the destruction
of their cities. In 1973 when I was teaching at the University of Algiers, there was yet another
Arab-Israeli war.
After many years my family’s house in Damascus still bears witness to the cruelty of wars.
On its balconies there are many holes that remind one of Israeli shelling. The French and the
English colonists have gone now, but the newcomers are the Zionist Jews from around the
globe. I have managed to visit the Syrian city of Qunaitra that was totally destroyed by the
Israeli forces at the beginning of the seventies. The inhabitants are no more to be seen there.
They are now scattered around the world.
During my short academic year in Algeria, 1973-74, I have witnessed the terrible scars of
French colonialism on the Algerian psyche. My students were robbed of their identity. They
spoke and wrote French, but did not know their own mother tongue. Some were even against
the Arabization program that was taking place in their country. It was hard for these young
people to start from scratch. Their colonizer has forced them to learn his language and history
for decades. I did not teach them Arabic, but English and American literature. We
communicated in colloquial Arabic once in a while, but mostly in French, or English. Although
Algeria got its independence in 1962, and the French settlers have left the country for other
shores, the problems of the aftermath of colonization were immense. It would probably take the
Algerians decades before they discover their own identity again and be able to stand united as
a nation regardless of their ethnic or religious background.
But it was only in Sydney, Australia where I had to live and work for many years that the ugly
face of colonialism had tormented me on a daily basis. I have witnessed the degradation of the
indigenous population in this former English colony, and experienced the discrimination
against non-British and non-westerners in general.
For a person with my background, I feel the urgent need to tackle this topic of colonialism
and its horrific impact on the psyche of ordinary people. A positive statement on Empire by a
historian, such as Niall Ferguson, saddens me immensely. I happen to be one of those affected
adversely by European colonialism. But thanks to my parents who did not send me to a
missionary school. I attended a Syrian public school that taught me Arabic language and
history, but also taught me the colonists’ languages and histories. In this sense, I was more
fortunate than some of my contemporaries who learnt more about England and France than
about their own country.
Reading Western historians, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists on the topic
of Empire and colonialism, one is left with a sense of bewilderment and disappointment. The
narrative almost always depicts the conquerors’ views. Only on rare occasions, one gets to
hear about the victims. Yet, many scholars seem to differentiate between people. Some victims
are deliberately hidden from view in Western books. It is my hope that this book will redress
the balance even though in a very modest way. Debunking The Myths of Colonization does not
deal with colonialism as a historical phenomenon on a large scale. Rather it is concerned with
the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer in specific autobiographical and
fictitious modern texts.
Samar Attar
May 2008
NOTES
1. Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London and New
York: Routledge, 2001), 137.
2. Salman Rushdi, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granata
Books in association with Penguin Books, 1992), 18. All subsequent page numbers will be cited in the text in parentheses.
3. Kamal Naser was born in Birzeit, Palestine, in 1925. He studied at the American University of Beirut. In 1956, he was
elected to represent Ramallah in the Jordanian Parliament. He was deported after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.
Naser was a member of the PLO Executive Committee, a chief spokesman, and Editor of an important Palestinian journal. The
Israelis killed him in Beirut on April 10, 1973. Cf. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian
Self-Determination, 1969-1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), xiv. Kamal Naser was an old friend and distant relative of
Edward Said.
Acknowledgments
Versions of some chapters have previously appeared in Arab Studies Quarterly. They are as
follows:
“A Discovery Voyage of Self and Other: Fadwa Tuqan’s Sojourn in England in the Early
Sixties”. ASQ. Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 1–28; “The Fascination of an Egyptian
Intellectual with Europe: Taha Husayn and France.” ASQ. Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2006): 13–
32; “Buried in the Deepest Recesses of Memory: A Queen or A Slave? The Vision of Ghassan
Kanafani and Emile Habibi of the City of Haifa.” ASQ. Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 37–55.
I am grateful to the journal for granting me permission to reprint those articles.