Sumathy Sivamohan
Why do the books deceive?
Why is every letter of the alphabet chained,
every human mouth bridled
From Concerto Al-Quds by Adonis (On Palestine): Trans: Khaled Mattawa
Why is every letter of the alphabet chained, indeed, as this poet asks. If I may attempt an answer to this question, I will want to raise it as an epistemological and pedagogic concern. And I do have to raise it as a question of Palestine as well, for our lives caught in the systems of knowledge production, and shaped by their parameters, have to reckon with one of the greatest political infamies of our shared global history: Palestine.
Many of us watch with horror the war on Gaza. We are anxious about the ongoing conflict, and the uptick on the war, with USA bombing Iran and the counter offensives. The war in Ukraine had already raised concerns about an impending World War III. Continuous wars, one leading to the other, had always been a part of our lives in recent times. We had always put it down to geopolitics and the West’s need to dominate and shape the world order in the way it wants to. Palestine had always been central to this. But this understanding, important as it is, has to be combined with a theoretical and semiotic understanding of what Palestine stands for, in very material terms; its peoples, the multiple dispossessions that the land has undergone, the horror of war and mayhem, the resistance of the Intifadas – in other words, in historical and political terms. We need to do this as our own act of solidarity and strategy, because our “books deceive.”
Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Neoliberalism
Let me begin, genealogically, with neoliberalism, the current political and economic moment. It is no overstatement to say that today neoliberalism as an economic and cultural truth of modernity (progress) has become naturalised, an uncontested premise of our economic and political system, an economic and political world order that combines colonialism with extreme economic appropriation, misappropriation. Neoliberalism is a neocolonial moment, in which the world’s working population is turned into an exploited (reserve) army of labour for global capital. We see colonial capital reinvented as global capital and financial markets, crisscrossing the world and masquerading as the new world order, the messianic deliverer. Yet, Palestine tells us, no!
One of the enduring colonial characteristics of the neoliberal moment is the way land in the third world, and in colonised regions across the globe, has been a chief marker of the process of dispossessing people of their livelihoods in their places of living. Global capital recolonises land through marketising it as a commodity. Colonialism has always been about land, the control of land, the control of the people of the land, the exploitation of land, and the exploitation of the labour of its people.
In the neocolonial, neoliberal world we live in, this colonial legacy repeats itself not just as farce, but as tragi-comedy. And then we have the tragedy of Palestine. Neoliberalism can be understood as the deep vulgarisation of the tragedy of colonialism. As neocolonial subjects, we gleefully adapt, change and create policies on education that have become a blanket endorsement of the global north’s, and the global order’s, politics and policies. Committees, Commissions and Collaborations converge to market these policies. The books continue to deceive.
Decolonising Knowledge: The Other
Decolonising knowledge has gained some traction in the postcolonial world, particularly in the areas of knowledge production and in education. It does put up a valiant challenge to colonial premises of advancements. Yet, much of this interesting trend, a politically demanding one, has become entangled for the most part, in creating east/west or north/south binaries. More often than not decolonisation merely re-narrates colonial paradigms in nationalist idioms, an act that Frantz Fanon, the arch anti-colonialist theorist warned us against in Black Skin White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. While we look on with horror at what is unfolding in Palestine, a century after the brazenly racist, colonialist Balfour Declaration that inaugurated the settlement of European Jews in Palestine, Palestine might well be a starting point for us to engage in a conversation on decolonisation. In such a re-examination of what Palestine was and is today, we may have to side step geopolitics as the point of entry and instead recentre colonial pursuits and persuasions as our primary focus.
The area around West Asia (called the Middle East from the European perspective) has always been, materially and metaphorically speaking, the pathway to the land masses around Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent in Asia. Politically and culturally, it was the crucible in which a European identity was forged, forming its crucial Other. The crusades are an early indication of it. In early modernity, the lines harden. Can one forget the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, the same year, Columbus lands in Bahamas, to inaugurate that side of the genocide project? When Emilia in the play Othello, tells Desdemona, “I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his [Lodovico] nether lip,” we can immediately see the central role Palestine plays in the nascent colonial imaginary of Shakespeare’s Europe. Shakespeare’s classic play on race immediately centres this othering of Othello as a question of the European Christian versus all others, including other Christians. The play is not just about race, but is about race and sexuality, one of those constitutive anxieties of the European psyche that helped shape colonial appropriations in the name of a putative moral superiority. Sometimes we seem to be still stuck in early modernity. Tracing the place of Palestine in the colonial imagery is important for any epistemological project of decolonisation.
Epistemologically and pedagogically, the question of Palestine should lead us to question our own nationalisms and nation state prerogatives. The Naqba in Palestine was in 1948, the same year, the people of Malaiyaham in Sri Lanka were disenfranchised, just a year after the conflagration that the independence of India and Pakistan was. These were not fortuitous. We have story after story to tell of this series of dispossessions. As Mahmood Mamdani insists, in Neither Settler nor Native, writing on Palestine, one needs to think beyond the nation and nationalism. Beyond the specificities of the conflict and war in Palestine, solidarity for Palestine may want to begin with this exploration of our shared colonial legacy, leading us into far reaching queries about the sociopolitical order of global capital in the world today. Decolonisation lies at the heart of an active democratisation process of the polity, both nations, and nation states, challenging the global world order at the same time. In any project that examines our knowledge systems, and in any putative attempt to decolonise education, we may need to begin with that.
As Adonis, the poet, writer and theorist, has enjoined us, every letter of the alphabet needs to speak freely, openly and honestly. Palestine, in 2025, has to show us the way and the friends of Palestine have to set the tone for this challenge. And then, just then, we may be able to turn around and look back at what happened in 1996, in Chemmani, and look at the children buried in the shallow graves of mass murder, without flinching, all while accepting responsibility.
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy … ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
From, “In Jerusalem” by Mahmoud Darwish
