***
In Lebanon, public art and culture events are regularly disrupted and reconfigured by the presence of Westerners – both tourists and residents – who insist that their gaze be accommodated and mediated through a language their ears can comprehend. By way of example, I recently found myself inadvertently trailed by an Italian filmmaker keen to examine the Beiruti ‘scene’. I first saw him at an alternative cinema space, for the screening of a Lebanese film. He requested that the Q&A be carried out in English or French, interrupting the Lebanese filmmaker’s Arabic commentary. I later ran into him once again at a ‘toxic tour’ of a landfill, organized by a local museum and advertised as an Arabic language event, where he yet again asked that his ignorance of the native language be catered to, his assumption being that all of the Arabs present should be comfortable enough in English for the change not to inconvenience anyone. The absurdity of asking Lebanese art and cultural practitioners to exile Arabic from such spaces seemed to escape the Italian filmmaker, as it does many other Western patrons like him in Lebanon. What is it that allows the Western tourist in, or temporary resident of, a city like Beirut to feel entitled enough to request that a foreign language communicate a Lebanese cultural or artistic experience? I can’t imagine myself walking into a gallery in Rome and unabashedly demanding that a curatorial tour be run in English. The idea wouldn’t just strike me as rude, but farcical, as it surely would the rest of the audience.***
What happens to the Lebanese subject when she’s taught that educated means fluent in a Western tongue, knowledgeable means well-traveled in Europe and/or America, cultured means caught up on Western cinema and literature? I won the US history award in high school. I’d never been to America. No one asked if I knew the history of the Arab world. No one taught me the history of the Arab world. What happens when we can only communicate ourselves in the language of our oppressors? We forget that we are still a minority. We forget that there are other ways to live and speak and think. We forget how to speak to the audience we’ve objectified, the local subjects we’ve petrified into relics of the bygone, stripping them of their dynamism in order to translate and commodify them for the West. And, when we generously remember and decide to turn our mouths towards this audience, we do it in an Arabic we have invented – an unfamiliar language in the guise of a familiar one, marinated so heavily in the flavors of other tongues that its original taste is hard to pick up. Our Arabic is always in translation, synthetically parochial, unable to detach from the other languages that dominate it. This is the violence of language. This is the tragic character of postcolonial elites. How do we decolonize our tongues?Raseef22 is a not for profit entity. Our focus is on quality journalism. Every contribution to the NasRaseef membership goes directly towards journalism production. We stand independent, not accepting corporate sponsorships, sponsored content or political funding.
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