To See in the Dark: The Nakba and the Landswept Way of Seeing

Abstract

Seeing with Palestine was a constitutive possibility in the anticolonial way of seeing from the moment of the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. This article traces this way of seeing in the genealogy of visual culture that emerged in Britain in dialogue with Black British cultural studies and art practice, based on the practices of Stuart Hall, George Lamming, John Berger, and Jean Mohr. It then discusses Palestinian artist Randa Maddah, whose work Berger described as “landswept.” The conclusion speculates on how to “see in the dark” via the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme.

There is a solidarity crisis with regard to Palestine, even as the Israeli state is now directed by visibly far-right extremists. In the United States, President Joe Biden has claimed “you need not be a Jew to be a Zionist,”¹ while in the United Kingdom, the film director Ken Loach was expelled in 2021 from the Labour Party² for attending a meeting about other people being expelled for supporting the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). And in Germany, Israel can do no wrong. How can I, Jewish not Palestinian, not even an “expert” in Palestine studies, see with and in support of Palestine? In the art world to which I am adjacent as a writer and a critic, orchestrated hostility to BDS has become a means to divide and undermine. It also obscures what should have been clear all along: seeing with Palestine was a constitutive possibility in the anticolonial way of seeing from the moment of the Nakba, when militias from the newly constituted state of Israel depopulated half of all Palestinian villages, leading to the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. Here, I trace this way of seeing in the genealogy of visual culture that emerged in Britain in dialogue with Black British cultural studies and art practice. I do so for reasons that are both personal and political. This network, connecting the Barbadian writer George Lamming, Jamaican cultural studies critic Stuart Hall, and the British art theorist John Berger, was the one in which my thinking was formed. To adapt Ruth Wilson Gilmore's aphorism that “freedom is a place,”³ solidarity is also a place. To be in solidarity, I need to know where I am from, which is not so easy on the landswept, slippery ground that my being of Jewish descent has become. The goal is and was not simply to replace one gaze with another but to open segregated spaces to visible relation. It is one practice of freedom among others, not a rule—the law of the gaze long theorized in visual culture should be abolished, not reworded.

Instituting the Contemporary

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain changed. The imperial tradition that began with the imposition of unitary rule after the first Indian War of Independence (1857) came to an end in 1947 with British rule giving way to the catastrophe of Partition. In that imperial era, the visual regime was still one of visuality, meaning the visualizing of history as if it were a battlefield, subject to the direction of the “Great Man” or “Hero.”⁴ The hero's long rule has continued in the cultural unconscious from the Western film genre to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its media franchises. In 1947, Britain was still fighting in Palestine, and the killing of two British soldiers by Zionist fighters provoked serious antisemitic riots. For certain sectors of the working class, stripped of their place in the imperial hierarchy, it was now above all important to be white. This “structure of [racist] feeling,”⁵ to adapt Raymond Williams's famous concept from the period, long preceded the first arrival of migrants from the Caribbean on the steamer Empire Windrush in 1948.⁶ Fascist leader Oswald Mosley created the slogan “Keep Britain White” in response, which was subsequently adopted by the Conservatives, especially in the person of cabinet minister and rabble rouser Enoch Powell. As Stuart Hall later put it, this “Powellism”—preceding its successor, Thatcherism, by thirty years—won, in that it saw “the formation of an official ‘racist’ politics.”⁷ Such politics continue today in the form of the “hostile environment” to migration, Europeans, and any person visibly or audibly not English. The “nausea” Frantz Fanon felt on a French train in 1950 when confronted with the “white gaze” on the “battlefield” of postwar social relations was at once historic and brand new.⁸

The name for this renewed engagement with visuality was and is the “contemporary.” In 1951, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) opened in London. Casting an eye back to the imperial Great Exhibition of 1851 and across at the Festival of [postimperial] Britain a century later, this was an institution to aestheticize the new decolonizing world. Almost at once art critic John Berger condemned its effort to create a monument to the unknown political prisoner, concluding from the winning entry: “The official modern art of the West is now bankrupt.”⁹ Twenty years later, Berger would declare at the beginning of his TV series Ways of Seeing that European painting had “come to an end” around 1900, so here he meant sculpture, the readymade, and other three-dimensional modern art. In reflecting back on an encounter in 1951 with T. S. Eliot and Jewish East End poet Emmanuel Litvinoff in the ICA, in terms of the anti-Black violence in Notting Hill of 1958 – 59, George Lamming first coined the phrase way of seeing in his classic 1960 study of the affects and effects of migration in London.¹⁰ Lamming grasped the possibilities of an anticolonial but empathetic seeing through and, by means of identification, with other others.

When he presented at the ICA's opening poetry reading, Lamming saw at once that it still played by racializing colonial rules. His entrance to read his poetry was greeted with oddly loud applause that he took to be an indication only that his Blackness had been seen. Collapsing physical time and space into psychic dimensions, Lamming saw how “the ICA is a neighbor of Notting Hill” (63). For Lamming, the ICA's high cultural discrimination was equivalent to the racist street violence later seen in Notting Hill, both being “expressions of a similar deficiency in the national life of the country” (73), meaning its racialized hierarchy. The next poet to read after him was Litvinoff, brought in as a token working-class writer. Litvinoff's poem was a scathing attack on T. S. Eliot's antisemitism, motivated by Eliot republishing some of his prewar poems that are clearly guilty of this charge. And then there was an uproar, not against Eliot but against Litvinoff. Understanding these attacks to be a high-culture form of violence, Lamming now saw how “the place really started to get like Notting Hill, except that there were no knives” (63). Poet Stephen Spender jumped up to accuse Litvinoff of failing to understand Eliot's work and its acknowledgment that there is “always a certain resentment between races.”¹¹ Such resentment had to be allowed, claimed Spender, rather than resisted. Watching, Lamming understood Litvinoff had failed to adopt English high culture's “common assumption of outlook” by raising “questions of Race” (74), rendering him back into a Jew, not a poet. Lamming realized that there was still a “colonial situation among English poets” (68).

As Spender spoke, it became known that Eliot himself was in the room. Lamming observed how Eliot was seen as Carlyle's “great man” (64) that no colonized subject could ever be, African or Jewish. At once, “the exercises in seeing and wanting to see had begun” (64) among the white men. Within the white contemporary of the ICA, the colonial poets saw one another by, first, differentiating themselves from persons of African descent, and then separating from Jews as intellectual inferiors, and finally, claiming association with the latter-day hero, who alone can grasp history by means of visualizing tradition.

Watching this high cultural violence engendered the anticolonial way of seeing. Lamming, in exile from Barbados, an island that he noted was (still) subject to four hundred years of colonial ordering and governing, watched Litvinoff, from the bomb-damaged impoverished East End of London, newly traumatized by the Holocaust, become visible to the English elite only as a disruption to be excluded. Litvinoff's refusal of deference made visible another way of seeing. It produced both Lamming's own understanding that “I identified with exile” (187) and Litvinoff's later engagement with exile as becoming. The anticolonial way of seeing mapped how white nationalism projected its own reality and used violence of all kinds to close any gap between that projection and actual conditions of existence. Lamming triangulated his position by means of relation with the immigrant Jewish minority so as to understand how West Indians were being seen. Fifty years later, Hall commented, “Looking back at these years I'm struck by the prominence of sight in the operations and theorizations of race.”¹² Lamming's way of seeing was reflective and reflexive. That is to say, he saw how others were seen, and this told him both how he was seen and that there were affinities among those excluded from the white reality of the imperial contemporary. Whereas that conservative contemporary was overdetermined by the past, manifested in the need to “keep Britain white”—as if it had not been a multiethnic country for centuries—Lamming's way of seeing was the conscious attempt to be present in the present, seeing the presence of difficult pasts, to work them out and lay their specters to ground.

The anticolonial way of seeing makes another world visible by activating what I call the visible relation, following Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant. Relation evokes “the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures.”¹³ By extension, the visible relation is an expansive and contradictory mutual experience. It works at the conscious level, countering the impulses of the received cultural unconscious and its racializing types and stereotypes. Fanon called this the effort to “ ‘consciousnessize’ the unconscious” in order to “become aware of the possibility of existence.”¹⁴ Visually, that effort is surrealism or, better, a sousrealism, a displacement of white reality and white sight from “below,” just as surveillance is countered by sousveillance.¹⁵ For the surrealist writer Suzanne Césaire, “freedom [is] that other abyss,”¹⁶ which emerges from below. Sousrealism is the realism of that abyss, the undercommons. It always allows for the “right to opacity,” to not be visible and transparent to all. Sousrealist visible relation is the counter to what Glissant called “root identity,”¹⁷ that nationalism centered around the self and a specific territory.

Litvinoff, by contrast, imagined the contemporary to be a relay between the past of the Holocaust and the future utopia that was to be Israel—at least until he visited the country in 1967. His way of seeing ignored the Nakba and Lamming's presence in the ICA alike. Looking back on the T. S. Eliot incident, Litvinoff recalled, “I could forgive him for writing them at that time. But to publish them again after Auschwitz was an appalling thing for him to do.”¹⁸ Certainly there was antisemitism at the time in Britain. In 1958, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher observed: “It is an indubitable fact that the Nazi massacre of six million European Jews has not made any deep impression on the nations of Europe. . . . It has left them almost cold.”¹⁹ Litvinoff talked about the Eliot incident for the rest of his life but never once mentioned that Lamming was there. It's not possible that he didn't notice him, given the racialized dynamics of 1950s London. Lamming's novels and criticism brought him considerable attention in the small circles of intellectual life in London, so even if Litvinoff had not paid much attention at the time, he might have mentioned it later. But he didn't. Why not? Perhaps, as an angry young Jewish man in the 1950s, Litvinoff could not see that, as the Jewish writer Simone Weil²⁰ and Martinican author Aimé Césaire²¹ had recognized, the Holocaust was the application of colonial violence to the metropole? Had he noted this, he could still have refused Eliot but done so in alliance with Lamming's rejection of the “colonial situation” in Britain that had created what was widely known in the period as the “colour bar,” which (still) excluded both Blacks and Jews. Litvinoff could, then, have seen the Nakba.

Festival of Imperialism

In the 1951 Festival of Britain that opened shortly after the ICA incident, Palestine was subsumed into the festival's claim that “British initiative in exploration and discovery is as strong as it ever was.” The giant Dome of Discovery, shaped like a B-movie UFO, contained an immense variety of materials. The proposed excavations by British architect Kathleen Kenyon at Tell-es-Sultan, known as Jericho, were exhibited in the shape of a large painted reconstruction by the artist Alan Sorrell (1904 – 74).²² To make this work, Sorrell used the aerial viewpoint of imperial visuality, derived from his flying experience as an artist attached to the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Using Kenyon's signature trench-style excavation, the 1952 – 58 dig advanced the understanding of the site at Tell-es-Sultan, showing that it had been settled at the beginning of what geologists call the Holocene, 11,500 years before the present.²³ She would prove by carbon dating that there was no city on the site at the time that Joshua was supposed to have laid it low. Her discoveries were enabled by Palestinian refugees. The site was bordered on the north side by a Palestinian refugee camp, known as ‘Ein as Sultan, where about nineteen thousand people had set up after the Nakba. Lacking basic services of any kind, the Palestinians dug into the slope of the tell to make bricks. In so doing, they uncovered intact tombs from the Middle Bronze Age. One of them came to Kenyon with a scarab they had discovered, to attract her attention. The refugees came from Jaffa and Gaza, as well as the countryside, so some among them may have had archaeological experience, or perhaps they guessed that there might be valuable objects in the tell. At the least, they created a job market for themselves in a place where there were no other opportunities.

Kenyon hired Palestinians to dig, paying them about half what a British servant would have been paid at the time. She dug in their backyards and in the houses of the camp, where she claimed people were “complaisant to the complete blocking of their streets.”²⁴ Her photographs show Palestinian workers deeply engaged with the excavation. In one shot of a Middle Bronze Age site within the camp, three Palestinians carefully extract from the ground a storage jar that still retains its stopper. In another striking photograph, not discussed by Kenyon, a Palestinian stands contemplating a Bronze Age skeleton at his feet. What was going through this man's mind in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba? Despite their contribution, there was no mention of Palestinians in the British Museum prepandemic displays of Kenyon's excavations, ignored by countless visitors on their way to the Egyptian artifacts. Equally, 380,000 tourists a year visited Tell-es-Sultan prepandemic to see what they took to be the Biblical “Jericho,” all evidence to the contrary. On the well-paved road from Jerusalem to Jericho, signs indicate where, exactly, the Good Samaritan performed his charity and point out a specific rock that “is” Lot's wife, who was petrified for looking back at the destruction of Sodom but not named. All these signs convey messages: Don't look. Don't see what there is to see. Visualize the colony as Judea and Samaria, “given” to the Israelites by God.

Berger in Palestine

Since 1972, the phrase way of seeing has been associated not with George Lamming but with John Berger. His book of that name was created as the companion to a not-much-watched BBC2 TV series that aired at the same time as Match of the Day, a very popular football magazine. Concerned with European painting for the most part, the book contains nothing about Palestine. Berger drew an odd line drawing to represent the interaction of colonizer and colonized, arguing that “the way each sees the other confirms his own view of himself.”²⁵ Beneath this statement, two stick figures look at each other. The figure on the left is captioned “less than human” and that on the right “omnipotent.” It seems to imply that the colonized see themselves as the colonizer sees them, as “less than human.” But the narrative returns to painting, so it remains uncertain.

Ways of Seeing has become a canonical, almost sacred, text. Berger's later anti-imperialism and his emphasis on the “undefeated despair” in Palestine and in its art and poetry have, by comparison, been ignored. Beginning with the Second Intifada (2000), the Palestinian uprising against Israeli colonial rule, Berger was deeply invested in Palestine solidarity. Probably photographer Jean Mohr got Berger thinking about the Nakba. A Swiss child of antifascist German refugees, Mohr had worked in Palestine from 1949 on with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). A photo from 1950 (see photo preceding this article) shows two young people closely studying a book, possibly an exercise book. The setting is an ICRC school at a camp in Hebron. It's an evocative scene, taken in what would become Mohr's signature style. A certain detachment allows the viewer to engage with the young people. Only then do you notice two adults off to the left watching the photograph being taken and others walking with a donkey up the stony slope. Viewed in 2022, it has further resonance: it reminds me of the reading groups arranged during the Great March of Return in 2018 between Gaza City and the border fence with Israel, as well as the opening scene of the film Farha (2021, dir. Darin J. Sallam). In a different register, the emptiness of the fields echoes just as powerfully. Annexed by Israel in 1967, Hebron is now surrounded by illegal Jewish settlements,such as Kiryat Arba, while much of the rest of the land is designated for military use only (Area C) or annexed by the state. Checkpoints are everywhere. Mohr's scene is unimaginable today.

Berger and Mohr worked together in the 1970s, creating the powerful photo essay The Seventh Man (1975) about migration in Europe, among other texts. In 1983 Berger introduced Mohr to Edward Said at a conference in Geneva. The event was organized by the United Nations, which allowed an exhibit of Mohr's photographs on the condition that there be no captions identifying the subjects as Palestinian.²⁶ The lively discussion as to how best to respond resulted in the book After the Last Sky (1986), in which Said's evocative description of Palestinian life and identity runs alongside Mohr's photos, rather than engaging with them systematically. It was not until 2003 that Berger began to publish about Palestine. Among his first writings was a short diary piece for the London Review of Books, in which Berger reported from Ramallah, using the word nakba, as he spelled it, in the first sentence. Confronted with the many posters depicting the martyrs of the Second Intifada, Berger set out to make a drawing in the Palestinian village Ein Qiniya as a memorial to the painter Abdelhamid Kharti, tortured and killed while volunteering for a medical emergency team. He understood that the occupation intended “to destroy the indigenous population's sense of temporal and spatial continuity.” Here, there was no way of seeing. As was his custom, Berger listened to people's stories but he did not neglect to tell his own in response:

Berger's father was Jewish, although he converted early to Catholicism. His mother, interestingly, was a suffragette.²⁸ Berger is not often, if at all, considered a Jewish writer, but in this one instance he acknowledged his genealogy. For me, it's not a question of imagined cousins but of my grandmother, a fighter in the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary organization in Mandate-era Palestine; my great-uncle in the more extreme Irgun, often described as a terrorist organization; and many other relatives with similar histories. I wonder if, as is true for me, these relations had caused Berger to hesitate over writing about Palestine during the Oslo “peace” process, until the Second Intifada dispelled that mirage?

Be that as it may, Berger often described how the point of his work was to create “action.” In 2006 he was the lead signatory of ninety, including such well-known figures as the musician Brian Eno, to a letter to the Guardian, calling for the cultural boycott of Israel in accord with the 2005 call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Most of the letter sets out the case for boycott, making it clear that the state, not individuals, was being targeted and drawing a parallel with the boycott of apartheid South Africa. I am not sure the Guardian would print a BDS call today. Anyone who did sign it would most likely find themselves subject to visible and invisible problems, from social media abuse to losing opportunities and positions. Berger was not attacked at the time.

Expanding on his earlier essay, Berger described in 2007 how he saw in Palestine “the careful destruction of a people.”²⁹ He wrote about rubble, physical and verbal. He wrote again about the Nakba. Bringing these matters together, he found in Palestine “a familiarity here with every sort of rubble, including the rubble of words,”³⁰ the rubble of words, swept away in what is so often called the flood of images created in this digitally saturated present. He saw in Palestine an “undefeated despair,” meaning “despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat.”³¹ Perhaps a translation of the Arabic sumud, this “undefeated despair” resonates in today's fraught political context. A few years later, Berger published a translation of Mahmoud Darwish's long poem Mural in collaboration with the anthropologist Rema Hammami. In his introduction, dated 2008 and first published in The Threepenny Review (2009), Berger remembered a dream he had after returning from the West Bank and Gaza. Standing in a desert, someone threw soil at him, which changed into strips of cloth: “These tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.”³² The ragpicker and the seller of old clothes, sometimes known as the Smouse, are archetypes of Jewishness in the cultural unconscious. My mother's father sold “seconds” from a street barrow in the East End, rising to later have his own shop. There's an echo with the lumpen, or rags, that named the lumpenproletariat, whom Fanon, the Black Panthers, and, for a moment, Stuart Hall once thought would create the “new human,” who was no longer haunted by such dreams. The rapid set of displacements from land to rags and words is a condensed history of Jewish diaspora, which is then overwritten by the land, Palestine.

Remembering his dream, Berger then coined the term landswept, which he defined as describing “a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.”³³ The land must be swept. The result would be not a new human but a new land that is also the old land. This land may now become the site of a new Nakba, given the combination of rising sea levels, persistent drought, and searing heat. In an effort to explain what landswept meant, Berger described Puppet Theater (2008), an installation by the Palestinian artist Randa Maddah (b. 1983).³⁴ While Berger saw Puppet Theater in an abandoned underground parking lot in Ramallah, Maddah later exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and is now a founding member of Fateh Al Mudarris Center for Arts and Culture in the occupied Golan Heights. Her installation consists of a bas-relief and three life-size figures. The relief forms an audience for the three figures as they crash into the ground, suspended by strings manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. There is a visual echo with the experience of the World Trade Center in 2001, Erich Fischl's sculpture Tumbling Woman (2001), and the fictional account in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). There is no memorial for those killed in Gaza, whom Berger remembered, or for those killed since.

For Berger, Maddah's installation was a prophecy, capable of changing the land and making it landswept: “It has claimed the very ground on which it is standing. It has made the killing field between the unreal spectators and the agonizing victims sacred.”³⁵ Berger concluded by quoting Darwish:

For Darwish, the decolonial contemporary is not so present. A sewn fabric, history is closer as the way to reach the Now. In the Atlantic world, such history is never far away. Its specters walk on what is known in Haiti as tè glisse, “slippery ground.”³⁷ According to Haitian novelist Edwige Danticat, “Even under the best of circumstances, the country can be stable one moment and crumbling the next.”³⁸Tè glisse may slip into the “abyss” of Atlantic slavery, but it also allows for unexpected new possibilities to arise from the sousrealist abyss of freedom, the undercommons. White supremacy has always been haunted by the “specter of Haiti” engendered by its successful revolution against slavery (1791 – 1804), the always already existing possibility that racial hierarchy might fall.³⁹ For Berger, resisting global capital requires the development of an “art of falling,” pioneered by the iconic figure of the Tramp, played by Jewish immigrant Charlie Chaplin in films like The Immigrant (1917). Chaplin's Tramp gains energy by falling: “Each time he falls he gets back onto his feet as a new man. A new man who is both the same man and different. The secret of his buoyancy is his multiplicity.”⁴⁰ The Tramp does not sink because he falls in and as the multitude, rebounding from each fall differently. From that fall on slippery ground comes “a hiatus of recognition,”⁴¹ the visible relation.

The Unfinished Conversation

Perhaps we are getting somewhere. The question now is not simply to find a way of seeing within contemporary cultural institutions but, rather, to find the conditions on landswept tè glisse in which it might be possible to be recognized, to see ourselves, to be seen, or to claim the right to opacity. Stuart Hall changed direction because of Notting Hill in 1958 and 1959. His “cultural turn” happened because of the direct action he took in response to racialized violence, centered around the creation of a Universities Left Review club in Notting Hill.⁴² By the 1980s he saw to his surprise that young Black British people “have a sense of some other person that they really are. They have become visible to themselves.”⁴³ This visibility had come to the fore in the 1976 uprising at Notting Hill Carnival, a carnival created by Trinidadian exile Claudia Jones as a response to racist violence. To be “black” in Britain at this time was to be anyone who was excluded by the statement “Keep Britain white.” As Hall put it, the defining symbol of white racism in the period was the “immigrant teenager,” who might be from the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Uganda, and so on.⁴⁴ Multiracial coalitions came together to push the fascists of the National Front out of Brick Lane, once a Jewish neighborhood where Litvinoff had worked, by then primarily lived in by South Asian migrants.⁴⁵ For me, a second-generation immigrant teenager growing up close to Notting Hill in West London, this coming to visibility was deeply inspiring and compelling. It is the root of my own long engagement with Black British visual culture as a way to become visible to myself, a latter-day way of seeing, in Lamming's sense. Just as Caribbean people in Britain could not get to that point without “seeing” Notting Hill, I cannot get there without “seeing” the Nakba.

For Hall's student, friend, and collaborator the artist John Akomfrah, this process was not simple or painless. In a long interview with the Danish critic Johanne Løgstrup, Akomfrah described it as a coming to terms with his doppelgänger, Hall's “other person.” There was the person that lived at home with their family in a condition of “conviviality.” And there was also a figure who sat in “the space of the fugitive, the trespass, the fear, the crime, the anxiety. . . . And then suddenly the two worlds come together and for any young person of color, this is the coming of race, the moments when you have this almost Lacanian mirror moment, when you encounter the doppelgänger and . . . this mythical figure is meant to be you.”⁴⁶ By 1980, what was for Lamming the singular moment of “Notting Hill” had become an everyday experience. The moment of recognition no longer came via the other but now came through the doubled self. While Akomfrah mentioned Lacan, there was no question of accepting a permanent condition of castrated subjection.⁴⁷ The collective “consciousnessized” rejection of this doppelgänger came in the Brixton and Toxteth Uprisings in 1981 against Thatcher's neoliberal government, led by Black youth.

Even though I suspect Akomfrah might find this analysis reductive, I think one can see an echo of this doubled subjectivity in the multiscreen format Akomfrah has used in his artwork. His three-screen projection The Unfinished Conversation (2012) is a meditation on Stuart Hall's life, using archive footage and stills only—no interviews or reflections. In the complex interplay produced by the three screens and five-channel sound, Miles Davis was blended with Hall's commentary and radio interviews and with ambient sound, such as the sea or machinery, creating a polyphony, edited so that all the sounds and images reinforced rather than disrupted one another. Every now and again, one screen was simply red. The archives included Hall's personal materials and many of his early broadcasts for the BBC, including a discussion of British Jews, shot against a backdrop of Hebrew characters. Notting Hill reverberated throughout, as in footage of the brave but isolated funeral procession for the Antiguan Kelso Cochrane, murdered there in 1959. Or when we see Hall in Soho's Partisan Café, a Universities and Left Review project, calmly stressing around 1958 that his generation was “very angry” because “for fifteen years at least we have been without any kind of moral or political leadership.” Cut back to his time at Oxford University,⁴⁸ where he knew at once he “could never be a part of it.” In another sequence, Hall comments: “Our family was part English, part African, part Portuguese Jew, even, some say, a little East Indian.”⁴⁹ There's my partial intersection with Hall: in the far-flung Sephardi diaspora from the Americas to Central Asia, seeing the “self” is never singular.

It was from such matrices that British visual culture emerged and was formed. In 1979 the journal Block, edited by staff at Middlesex Polytechnic, saw its remit as encompassing “visual culture and its role within society.” It took time for this to coalesce into a visual activism that could embrace having been formed in the decolonial moment that produced the Nakba and Notting Hill. And yet it has finally happened. The Journal of Visual Culture, based in the United Kingdom but with a transnational editorial collective and board, published its “Palestine Portfolio” in 2021. Over 250 pages long, the Portfolio brought together fifty artists, activists, and academics “in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli settler colonialism and the Apartheid that results from it . . . as part of the ongoing Nakbah.”⁵⁰ This solidarity is a new point of departure for all visual culture practice, one that has nonetheless been there all along in Lamming's “way of seeing,” Berger's “ways of seeing,” and their interactions.

2022

In the mad, hot summer of 2022, the art world staged a transnational confrontation, as if to help me frame these questions. There were yet more European convolutions around so-called anti-antisemitism in Germany around the documenta 15 exhibition. It has now become all but impossible in Germany to criticize any action of the state of Israel or to express solidarity with Palestine.⁵¹ At the same moment, in New York, where I live, perhaps the most Jewish city on the planet, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was showing Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme's multisite installation May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, a powerful assemblage of found video from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, mixed with performances created in response. In the MoMA installation, video was projected onto all four walls of a studio space, including a series of metal and concrete square and rectangular screens, placed so as to break up the modernist flatness of the walls. Titled Only sounds that tremble through us (four-channel high-definition color video, 7.1 surround sound, metal and concrete projection panels, and violet window gels), it was an immersive experience. Text in Arabic and English captioned video of flowers, the desert, dancers, bulldozers, and soldiers. It was often projected in negative because, as one caption had it, “WE ARE IN THE NEGATIVE UNBOUND” or, more simply, “we are the negative.”

The second part of this project was a companion online installation sponsored by the New York City – based arts organization Dia.⁵² In this part of the project, the user controls which pieces play and at what volume, reminiscent of earlier utopian hopes for the internet in the 1990s, long undermined by corporate platforms like Facebook. On the website, users can play multiple videos at once to create a layered sound or use just one soundtrack. Users can also access the archive of videos and learn more about their provenance. At a public presentation of the installation at Dia, I noticed a page from an essay by Middle East scholar Nasser Abourahme citing Berger's writing about rubble discussed above (fig. 1). The artists cannot have known how I might feel that resonance, yet it is clearly part of the work—not centrally, not as a “Jewish voice for peace” or any other such claim. One part of what it means to “consent not to be a single being,” to use Glissant's phrase, as then reframed by Fred Moten,⁵³ is to set aside such particularity in the formation of visible relation.

Watching Abbas and Abou Rahme's work is to see the rubble and the flood created by the collective catastrophe. On the same screen as the Berger quote, and also seen in the installation at the Museum of Modern Art, is a video in which Palestinian protestors in Jerusalem articulated, “THOSE WHO CHANT DO NOT DIE.” It is a statement counterintuitive to Western thinking, but for those who consent not to be a single being, there is continuity because the chant continues even if some of those chanting die. It embodies a popular countersovereignty to the power evoked in the ritual declaration, “The king is dead, long live the king”: kings die; majesty does not. The chanters refuse to accept the domination of armies: chanters die; the people do not.

Let me try to put into words the rubble that surrounds me, as in Samuel Beckett's play Endgame (1957), when I see this screen. There are layers to it. One layer allows me to feel that this interval, however long it lasts (1948 – ?), will not undo the possibility of anticolonial antifascism by those once called Jewish. It is beside the point whether I myself live to see that possibility become real, as Walter Benjamin and Berger both knew. What remains after the Nakba in my family's archive on Ancestry.com are disputed fragments of memory, accidental pieces of documentation like shipping manifests, and assemblages of photographs, often undated—visual rubble. There's a photograph of my father as a child, playing with a British soldier on a boat headed to Palestine around 1939, and another of the London house he first lived in, damaged by bombs in the Blitz. Rubble. The why and the how of making the Nakba by my relatives, who were themselves refugees, literally keeps me awake at night. Abou Rahme and Abbas worked with a group of performers who explored their videos through movement. There is a gesture they make with the shoulder, as if the body is flung forward into an involuntary movement. It leads them into a dance, all slashing verticals and angles, in which the body does not move forward but expresses intense energy. Looking at these performances was a new lens for me to feel and hear and see a movement with which I am obsessed: the step that the Jewish refugee, my grandmother, for example, took off the boat onto the land of Palestine. And in that dialectical step, she became a settler. Soon, she would work underground in the dark, assembling weapons for the Haganah militia. That place is now a museum near Tel Aviv, calling itself the Ayalon Institute—fully lit now, of course. To see the Nakba, I have instead to begin in that dark, the negative; to see the other which is not, or should not be, one, my other, or grand(m)other; to become something other than what I am supposed to have been; to become visible to myself; to create visible relation; to find what artist Claire Fontaine calls the “human strike.”⁵⁴

This Denkbild is a thinking through of the anticolonial way of seeing implied by my recent work. My thanks to everyone at Social Text, especially the anonymous readers and the production team.

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