A mix of excitement and guilt. Excitement at reading in today’s newspaper about Nadette de Visser’s traveling exhibition Objects in Conflict. Guilt at being reminded that, since 2002, I’ve had similar projects in mind that, through lethargy as much as lack of time, I’ve never followed through.

This exhibition places the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a personal context. The sixteen ordinary objects on display each tell an extraordinary story. The individual objects are, piece by piece, symbolic of a personal experience. The objects are almost all intrinsically worthless.

It is their meaning that makes the invaluable to their owners. Old key, spectacles or sports shoe, they are all irreplaceable symbols because they represent an experience. They tell a story about a great loss or something dearly missed, a life lost or a house left behind. The sixteen stories, half of them Israeli and half of them Palestinian, together give an idea of what living in this conflict can mean.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict every day something ‘newsy’ happens and the eyes of the media are directed toward that fleeting reality. But there is another way to look at the conflict, one that might be much more relevant, but rarely makes the headlines. It is the conflict seen through the eyes of individual people with their individual story. This exhibit focusses on that perspective. Away from politics and newsflashes and back to human proportions. Those experiences are what the conflict is really about, because they reflect the consequences of the play around power, land and money.
http://www.objectsinconflict.com

Examples of such objects are published, with photographs, in The Independent of this morning. The wine bottle, for example:

Ehud Amram, a lawyer, is a religious Jewish settler in the West Bank. A Palestinian from a nearby village built his house for him, and even though Mr Amram didn’t have much money, Sharif, the builder was prepared to wait for his money. He said, “Pay me when you have it.” The two became friends. “He is a very nice person, we enjoyed talking to him, laughing with him. I’m a lawyer and yet I never signed a contract with him”. They’re even planning a holiday in Europe together towards the end of 1999. Such relations between Palestinians even with neighbouring settlers was not exceptional then, before the second intifada started in 2000. What is exceptional is that they stayed friends after 2000. Some three years ago, Sharif called to say his cousin had been found with a knife and arrested as suspected terrorist. Asked by Sharif to represent him, Mr Amram met the detained man and quickly established that he was a psychiatric case. He went, wearing his kippa, as his advocate to the military court in Ramallah and to the amazement of everyone in the court, Palestinians and Israelis alike, pleaded the man’s case-and won. Sharif’s family slaughtered a sheep in Mr Amram’s honour, and as Mr Amram testified: “Since then, every year at the end of the summer, Sharif’s family invited me to come over and take grapes. And those grapes are made into wine by my father.”

One can argue the finer points of each story from every which moral and ethical standpoint one wishes, and indeed it would be negligent not to do so. But that’s not the core issue that comes to my mind. I’m remembering my interrupted venture of mid-2002 to bring peoples together, under a banner of “fostering world citizenship”, through sharing of memories and experiences. I’d described the idea in an email to Rita, my friend in Germany:

As you know, the essence of the project is to promote the importance of oral history / local community history with a view to [1] capturing 1st-person memories of those who have lived history, [2] thereby creating a sense of community rootedness of a younger generation, and [3] transnationally highlighting commonalities of experience, thus fostering a sense of global citizenship. The top-level project will be made up, over time, of a large number of mini-projects pairing cities with cities, communities with communities.

Example: both Muenster and Portsmouth were largely destroyed by air raids during WWII, and there must still be an older generation that has personal memories of this. Thus a Muenster-Portsmouth project (one of ultimately dozens, perhaps hundreds, in the site) would run like this:

[Stage 1] primary (and/or secondary?) schools in each city would, for a special ‘local history’ day, invite older citizens (grandparents, great-grandparents) in to tell their stories and recount their memories (supported by photographs and other memorabilia). Capturing the memories (as audio recordings, digitisation of photos, letters, etc) would become a history project for the kids. Outcome: kids come to understand their historical rootedness in their communities, come to understand the historic community values, etc, hence supporting citizenship at a local level.

[Stage 2] on a later date, a two-way video link between schools in each of the cities would have kids enacting (as a ‘living history’ exercise) some scenario(s) based upon the recorded memories of the older citizens (e.g. life in the air raid shelter?) Outcome: kids, by exchanging oral histories with their peers in the partner schools, come to understand the commonality of experience, at a very human level, of the two communities, hence fostering a sense of common citizenship at a global level.

[Stage 3] the web site for the project will grow incrementally during Stages 1 and 2 as material from each stage is uploaded. In Stage 3, the entire content of [1] and [2], appropriately structured, will finally have been copied to the server, with forums that will thereafter allow not only the communities but also anyone in the world to contribute further materials (comments, photos, scanned contemporaneous newsclippings, scanned letters, audio, etc). Outcome: from many such mini-projects we build a grassroots global community with a strong sense of world citizenship.

Eighteen months back I’d sketched out a first pilot project between Portsmouth (UK) and Cape Town (RSA), bringing together senior citizens who had respectively lived through the trauma of the Blitz in the UK and through the forced removals in South Africa. Again I had written to Rita about the project:

on community memory … viz. senior citizens in (for the pilot project) Portsmouth and Cape Town narrating their personal histories for their grandchildren and to each other — preserving oral narratives for future generations, but also sharing comparable narratives across geographic and ethnic frontiers. Thus, in our pilot project, the blitz and war-time Portsmouth coupled with the upheavals of the group areas act and forced removals in apartheid South Africa. Beyond the pilot, other twinnings are envisaged, e.g., shared oral histories of rural farming communities in Oklahoma and Palestine, tsunami victims in Asia with Katrina-victims in New Orleans, shared oral histories between Dresden and Coventry, of 1950s witch hunts in McCarthyist USA vs Stalinist Russia, … whatever innovative ideas come to mind. Offline, these would be public events in communities, supplemented with videoconferences between communities; online, people throughout the world would be encouraged to upload their photos, narratives, etc, to build a global community memory of personal histories to complement and challenge the ‘official’ versions of the published history text books. A value-added component of the web site is that it might then also become a (searchable) rich repository and research tool for professional historians.

A couple of weeks back I began work on my history wiki, “My Life is My Museum“, as the initial test platform for the project. I now have to assuage my feelings of guilt at neglecting my projects by working concertedly on building the site and placing it at the heart of the project described in my emails to Rita.

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The Museum of London has just launched its “Map My London” site, a Google Map for public memories of London:

Do you have a favourite London moment that you want to share? Add it to our emotional map of London at a new website which will revolutionise the way the history of the city is gathered and displayed.

A great idea, of course (but then, having independently thought of it myself some six months or so back, I would say that, wouldn’t I?) Londoners can now add their memories, in any one of six colour-coded categories (love / loss, fate / coincidence, beauty / horror, joy / struggle, friendship / solitude … and, if that’s not enough, you can always add more), to a Google map of London. My worry is that this will take diversity and the democratisation of history into territories not envisaged by its designers. I have no problem with:

“In May 1923, George V opened King George’s Park in Wandsworth and spoke to residents of local council houses. He patted me on the head and according to my mother said ‘How are you, sonny’? At the age of four I didn’t know that I would soon begin to wish for a republic.”

and

“This is Wooland School in Downham. I attended this school because I was recovering from tuberculosis. It was then an open air school for invalid childen and open air was the order of the day. The four classrooms had no windows but were sheltered from the elements only by canvas curtains. In the winter it was so cold that the pen used to stick to your fingers. At lunchtime we were compelled to take a half hour sleep on semi hammocks. Of course being kids the last thing we wanted to do was to sleep.”

though maybe a photo or two and a tad more text would enrich the contribution. But I remain unconvinced that contributions such as the following amount to much more than graffiti. And, of course, the more graffiti the less seriously will site visitors view the map and the less likely will they be to add more than graffiti themselves. This is not simply a trivialisation of history; the very narrowly personal nature of many of the memories offers nothing (but correct me if you think me mistaken) to enrich the reader’s understandings of, and knowledge about, the city and its people. But judge for yourself:

“I was born Here! My mom still lives here”

“In the summer me and my best friend got totally battered on warm white wine, and were being generally girly and irritating. This proved too much for our boyfriends, who took themselves outside to sit on the street and chat. Which prompted us girls to nearly kill ourselves, dangling out of a 4th floor window, trying to listen in on their conversation..our not-so-subtle drunken screeching soon alerted the boys to our antics…!”

“I saw Japanese breakcore legend DJ Scotch Egg play for the first time with a live band (feturing three drummers) at this basement venue.”

“I started talking to this cute Italian guy in the bus queue at Stansted airport. We chatted during the whole bus ride and swapped numbers before we parted. We met up a couple of days later, it was a typical calm, dry and warm London summer’s evening. After a few drinks on Marylebone High Street, in the shadow of the dark, we climbed over the fence of the Manchester Sq Private Garden and made love on the grass.”

“used to be red”

“Met – what was a mystery who became much more – stuggle and love? lust and frustration – life eh !”

Unless I’ve maybe missed the point, what seems to me to be missing is the kind of community ‘quality control’ that comes from peer review, as is the case with Wikipedia.

I’ve a great deal more confidence in a couple of other projects (Peninsula Voices and Soweto 76/Oral Testimonies), neither yet fully online yet both should be. But more about those another day.

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I have no problem with you wearing the veil, the niqab, the hijab, the jilbab, the burqa, the khimar, the abaya, the chador, whatever you choose. I honestly don’t. I’d prefer to be able to see your face, should niqab be your style; but maybe that’s just because seeing people’s faces is what, in my 54 years, I’ve become used to. And I have to say that I felt the same mild unease in Alicante last Easter at the sight of the capuchónes in the Semana Santa processions. I’m sure they’re really nice guys; but, hey, I’d feel more comfortable if I could see their faces.

“The most tiresome argument in this whole debate is that the niqab makes white, middle-class English people feel ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘threatened’. Well, I want to say, what a load of whingeing wusses. Threatened by drunken football hooligans or muggers—that I can understand. But threatened by a woman quietly going about her business in a veil? As for uncomfortable: myself, I feel uncomfortable with a certain kind of pink-faced Englishman wearing crimson braces, a white-cuffed pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. Their clothing is a fair predictor of the views that will come out of their mouths. But I don’t ask them to take off their braces.”
Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian, 12 October 2006

I know it says in the Qur’an that, in wearing the veil, you “may be distinguished [from slave women] and not be harassed” (Ayat 33:59). But I rather think that in the current Islamophobic climate of Europe and the US you probably get harassed because you do wear it, and that pisses me off possibly as much as it pisses you off. (And, in any case, there probably aren’t so many slave women on the streets of London these days, so the accepted rational looks just a tad quaint and pointless.) Look at it this way: if punks had, in the late 1970s, opted for veils rather than for safety pins and bondage trousers, the old fogies would have ranted for a while (as old fogies always do) with their usual “what do these bloody teenagers think they look like” spiels but Vivienne Westwood would still have made a mint out of black crepe and picked up her DBE somewhere along the line, and no one wearing the veil would have been subjected to abusive jibes about ‘bloody Pakis’ and told to ‘go back where you came from’. Because, as you know, it’s not the veil per se that brings the bigots out of the woodwork—it’s the inscrutable and thus intolerable Otherness, signaled by the wearing of the veil, that unnerves them and thus elicits the contemptibly racist diatribe. They just don’t have the wit, the dignity, the nobleness of spirit, to accept difference in others.

So let’s put this on record: I for one will not harass you and I shall vigorously and vociferously defend your right to wear whatever you wish. Let me be honest about it: since I would demand a woman’s freedom to dress however she darn well likes in Saudi Arabia, where women are compelled by law to wear an abaya in public, and since I get really pissed off every time I read in the newspaper of women in Iran or Afghanistan or wherever else who are beaten and abused for being ‘imporperly dressed’, then it would be an appalling hypocrisy on my part not to demand a woman’s freedom of choice in manner of dress in the United Kingdom.

“In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me…By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.”
attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller, and widely circulated by social activists in the US in the 1960s to urge support for civil rights.

And I would like to think that you too will just as eagerly and energetically defend the fundamental human rights of others. When some homophobic bigot launches a verbal assault on your gay or lesbian friend, makes snide remarks about “queers” and “poofters” and “dykes”, you will unhesitatingly and unconditionally assert the right of your friend to openly live his or her sexuality without fear of abuse; when some loudmouth starts shouting off about ‘fucking kikes’ and ‘bloody yids’ you will protest against such viciously ignorant anti-Semitism, and as an expression of solidarity stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Jewish sisters and brothers; and when your sister asserts her right to date that Hindu boy who lives down the street and your father objects for all the wrong reasons, you will remind him that it is the non-negotiable responsibility of all of us, black and white, Moslem and Jew, gay and straight, to be tolerant of others who are tolerant of us, to stand up for the rights of those who in turn defend the rights we ourselves quite properly demand and expect.

Don’t read any hidden agenda into this; don’t think I’m taking a subtle crack at you. I do actually want to get to know you, to know you as a person rather than as a stereotype. So come and have coffee with me and my family some time. Tell us about your life and we’ll tell you about ours, and we’ll make an honest and unprejudiced effort to understand one another. That’s the way that good community relationships and happy societies are built.

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Searching the web this afternoon for something wholly unrelated to this, I serendipitously came upon …

[EXCERPT] “Suppose we bring online learning, complete with cheap laptops, free wi-fi, and the latest in social software learning pedagogies to the children of Hebron, so that they can continue their education from their homes without risking their lives everyday. Would we be able to count this as an increase in their freedoms? Wouldn’t removing the checkpoint be a more efficient (although much more complicated) solution?” (Ulises Ali Mejias at Ideant)

Go ahead: click the link and read the rest.

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