The emotions and experiences of youth are profound, and long-lasting. The politicians and leaders whose actions, conflict and writings affect the lives of millions were once children too, absorbing the conversations of their elders and catching details which adults often miss in their haste or preoccupation with other matters. As Sari Nusseibeh puts it, poignantly, in Once Upon a Country, “My brother Zaki, a precocious ten-year-old, watched the debates with large, round, curious eyes, absorbing every word as if his brain were a complex calculating machine” (73). Clearly, Nusseibeh himself — despite his occasional disclaimer that he oft preferred other distractions to the heated political salons of his Palestinian family — clearly gathered a vast amount of information as a child among the Arab intellectual élite of Jerusalem. So too, in Amos Oz’s Tale of Love and Darkness, the author recounts his childhood in Jerusalem on the Jewish side of the divided city, delicately weaving together political events with intimate personal moments. In this short essay, I will demonstrate how the childhood perspective of both young protagonists is a salient method which sheds light on the domestic underbelly of Jerusalem politics, and how the “othering” of the opposite side is rooted in separation since birth.
Nusseibeh’s childhood perspective shows the intimate side of his father’s involved Arab political life. His first political recollections were “of screams,” after the new war broke out in 1956 (73). These “screams” are left ambiguous, suggesting a child’s ignorant and innocent fear. As a child, Nusseibeh described politics as the “gravitational center” of his family life (73). Privy to conversations which historians and scholars can only dream about, his narrative of his father’s political activity evokes an image of the young author — more cognizant of his surroundings than the adults realize, with “curious eyes” like his brother — scurrying underfoot. He relates the “interminable discussions” in his living room about King Abdullah (Jordan), Ben-Gurion, Eisenhower, Nasser and others (73). These conversations were less than abstract, though, as these political leaders figured as personal characters in Nusseibeh’s childhood. Later in the text, Nusseibeh casually mentions King Hussein dropping by the house for lunch, and a later falling-out between his father and the Jordanian sovereign (89-91). The living room was filled with “dense smoke” and lengthy evening debates (73). His mother, a Palestinian refugee from the coastal plain, talked politics infused with a literary air, filling the young narrator’s brain with images of a “magical dreamland,” lush with oranges, the Mediterranean Sea, all imbued with “idyllic innocence” (73). Out of his own bedroom window — arguably the most intimate of spaces — the narrator could peer out into a “shoot-to-kill zone,” separating the Jews in “enemy territory” from Arabs like himself (74). With such views out of his childhood window, little exposition is required to emphasize how interwoven personal life and the perils of politics were for Nusseibeh and other Jerusalemites.
Nusseibeh addresses the simultaneous proximity and division with neighboring Jews in the text’s prologue, directly addressing Amos Oz’s narrative: “I was raised no more than a hundred feet away from where Oz lived out his childhood, just on the other side of the fortified ‘No Man’s Land,’” (16). Oz, as a child, sat in his parents’ “small, dark apartment,” coming up with military strategies to defend the Jewish people, knowing little of the “ancient cobbled lanes” of the Arab quarters of the Old City which had long been inhabited and preserved by Nusseibeh’s ancestors (16). Only a hundred feet away, the intimate spaces of Oz’s home provided sanctuary for entirely opposing beliefs; a boyhood with the opposite experience of Nusseibeh’s.
After the 1947 announcement of the partition plan for Israel and the plan for a Jewish state, Oz relates the domestic side of a profound political change. Far from the dry narratives related in historical textbooks, Oz’s childhood recollections of the late November merrymaking suggest the raw passion and emotion which remain a powerful part of Israeli national memory. A child of course, his elders instructed him to sleep until the vote ended near midnight, after which he awoke and — in what felt like a “frightening dream,” a neighbor or stranger picked up the young narrator, so he “wouldn’t be trampled underfoot,” after which he was passed from hand to hand until he landed on his father’s shoulders (Ch. 44). Oz feeds the reader a stream of consciousness of the festive night: his parents shout, his mother strokes his head and back (Ch. 44). Within the personal narrative, Oz interweaves the personal and political realms. His mother’s hand is a symbol, working “perhaps to soothe us or perhaps not, perhaps out of the depths she was also trying to share with him [father] and me in our shout and with the whole street, the whole neighborhood, the whole city, and the whole country” (Ch. 44). If the original Hebrew is a direct translation of “out of the depths,” this brief reference (ממעמקים) to Psalm 130 calls to mind the soulful song of ascents and Jewish hope for Israel’s Divine redemption. His mother’s hand, thus, calls to mind an entire narrative of national and religious memory. Amid this political redemption, the touch of his mother connects Oz’s personal life to religious politics.
Later that evening, back in the confines of his childhood bedroom, the political and personal continue to connect through Oz’s youthful eyes. His father had told him on the street, “… look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won’t forget this night to your dying day and you’ll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we’re long gone” (Ch. 44). After the political rejoicing, Oz recounts crawling back into bed past his bedtime and dressed in his street clothing — his childhood innocence peeks through: his parents’ rules are just as important to include as the political narrative at hand. Oz’s father sat down beside him in bed and told him a painful story of anti-Semitic assaults he experienced in Eastern Europe. His father, caressing his son, told him that “from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew” (Ch. 44). The bedroom here becomes main stage for a powerful infusion of classical Zionist values. The moment becomes increasingly personal, as the narrator sleepily touches his father’s face, feeling the only tears his father would ever shed in front of him. For many children, seeing a parent reduced to tears is one of the most powerful marks of an emotional moment. In the Nusseibeh writing, too, the narrator’s sister was reduced to tears by Anne Frank’s Holocaust narrative, as is his Palestinian mother who “suffered at the hands of the Zionists: “Without a word, my mother gently wiped Saedah’s tears away, and furtively wiped away her own” (72-73). The reader, allowed into these private childhood moments in the narrators’ memories, sees family emotions on both sides of No Man’s Land.
Separated since birth, each child protagonist sees the other side as alien. The ultra-orthodox provide a good focal point for the divide. Nusseibeh, peering out from the few vantage points he has over the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, sees the highly observant Haredi Jerusalemites as otherworldly. Intrigued, he describes men with “long wizard’s beards,” black coats and “curly side locks” (75). The men are “bearded creatures,” appearing eerily in the distance before disappearing behind another corner, entering and exiting his reality silently and at a distance, like “in a dream” (75). Meanwhile, on Oz’s side of No Man’s Land, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has a Hebrew name — Mea She’arim — but is just a passing thought at the beginning of a paragraph which focuses mainly on the foreign side of Jerusalem, the stomping ground of Nusseibeh and his ancestors (Ch. 40). Oz describes an “opposite Jerusalem,” consisting of “menacing yet fascinating” Abyssinian, Arab, pilgrim, Ottoman, missionary, and other groups. Oz recalls an unknown world, filled with bells and “winged enchantments” (Ch. 40). To a childhood Oz, Nusseibeh’s side of Jerusalem is alien and hostile, “a veiled city, concealing dangerous secrets, heavy with crosses, turrets, mosques, and mysteries … through whose streets ministers of alien cults shrouded in black cloaks and priestly garb flitted like dark shadows, monks and nuns, kadis and muezzins …” (Ch. 40). As children, living before the Internet shed light on the going-ons in forbidden territories, neighboring communities provided as much intrigue and mystery to the protagonists as scripture or the content of their latest pleasure novel. It is only evident that such antagonism and alienation plays into adult politics, years later. After all, though in Chapter 44 Oz describes the melancholy, foreboding silence which must have filled Arab homes on the night of the partition announcement, such insight is the product of years of mature introspection and reflection. As a child, the Arab quarters and “veiled city” of non-Jewish Jerusalem remained a foreign world into which few, if any, entered.
In both works, the recollections of a childhood in a war-torn Jerusalem provide unique insight into the city’s history and its residents. The protagonists’ reflections on childhoods brimming with conflict and politics provided me a chance to sympathize with the intimate, hidden angles of Jerusalem history. Both child narrators, halfway through the twentieth century, also observe the stirrings of impending history outside of Jerusalem’s insulating mountains, albeit from opposite sides. Oz notes that “over the hills and far away, a new breed of heroic Jews was springing up, a tanned, tough, silent, practical breed of men, totally unlike the Jews of the Diaspora” (Ch. 1). He is referencing the suntanned, passionate new arrivals to the coastal plain, incidentally the birthplace of Nusseibeh’s refugee mother. The modern reader knows that the “tough” and “practical” men on the coastal plan, organizing collective farms and military organizations, would eventually continue to push Jewish infrastructure into the hills. Nusseibeh, a descendant of a 1,300-year-old Jerusalemite dynasty, may be alluding to this future, sensing it even as a child. In the years preceding the 1967 takeover of Jordanian Jerusalem by Israel, he describes faraway political “convulsions” as mere words in the newspaper or on BBC radio (79). Nusseibeh compares his childhood home’s nightly political salons to that of a Russian novel, where unassuming characters approach issues as the stuff of evening discussion — unaware that the “far-off cataclysm[s]” will eventually bring their entire world “crashing down” (79).
Works Cited
Nusseibeh, Sari. Once Upon a Country. Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 2007.
Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated by Nicholas de Lange, Harcourt Publishing
Company, 2004.*
*I used chapter references since the page numbers are not standardized due to the e-book format.
I lock eyes with the man hanging out of the hotel window.
nettle and thistle scratched me underfoot, drawing blood
A Jewish maxim teaches that the Bible, and its many values and moral constructs, were realized by those who lived before us as modeled in the Divine image, recorded, and passed down. So too did Medieval clergy look to Scripture, and other sources from antiquity, to strongly guide their moralization of labor. Certain stigmas about licit and illicit trade practices, recorded in the Pentateuch and which likely even pre-dated the Israelites, have continued to hold sway over thinkers even into today. In this essay, using Jacques LeGoff’s essay “Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West” as a guide, I will show how Medieval ways of moralizing labor were largely based on similar ancient stigmas and taboos. Looking to the Pentateuch and touching on Greek thought, I will try to show that Biblical stigmas about mercantile trade and currency, among other taboos about purity and societal division, made their way into Medieval thought.
INTRODUCTION
Senegal, located in coastal West Africa, emerged from French colonial control in 1960 and charted a unique path in independent politics. In this paper, I will delve into the history of Senegal through 1991, starting with a brief overview of French control in Senegal, where residents enjoyed unique rights of participation and education among French West Africans. Then, I will examine the transition to independence in 1960, the rise of independent (and socialist) politics in the country, domestic and border crises, before finally exploring the saliency of ethnicity and caste in Senegalese politics.
Since 1990, new Senegalese leaders have replaced the old guard of Léopold Sédar Senghor and his chosen successor Abdou Diouf in a series of peaceful elections, alongside political reforms which have allowed for wider participation in government. The crumbling of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990’s led to a widespread disenfranchisement of Marxism, which had defined pre-1990’s political opposition in Senegal. Paired with this move away from far-left ideology has been an increased political tolerance and even interest in catering to Senegal’s deeply influential Maraboutic Islamic authorities. A deeply pious country, religious messaging is increasingly impactful as a means of both connecting with voters, and possibly contributing to Senegal’s democratic strengths. In this piece, I will first seek to provide a brief historical overview of Senegal’s elections since 1990. Then, I will move on to discuss major political reforms over the last three decades. Finally, I will examine the influence of religion on post- 1990’s politics, before concluding with a brief sketch of remaining sociopolitical trends and challenges.
Resorting to a culturalist interpretation of civil war is convenient. It provides a reductive narrative, explaining away modern conflict as the inevitable result of ancient cultural feuds. In his seminal work on the “clash of civilizations,” Huntington (1993) argues that the roots of modern conflict lie in irreconcilable divisions between different peoples (p. 25). With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, among other countries, such culturalist perspectives became a dominant frame for interpreting conflict (Fearon and Laitin 2003, p. 78). Yet, a wide body of scholarship exposes flaws in Huntington’s thesis. In this paper, I will argue that Huntington’s culturalist explanation of why civil war occurs in diverse countries is weakened by an exclusion of the importance of leadership, financial incentives, and certain key contextual factors.