Oppressors form strategies for keeping their subjects silent, says Palestinian writer

Silence and its many aspects was the theme of the speech of Palestinian writer Adania Shibli who was the keynote speaker at the concluding ceremony of the three-day Adab Festival 2020 at the Karachi Arts Council on Sunday.

Referring to the Israeli oppression in Palestine, she cited examples of how Israel was trying to suppress Arabic, the language of Palestinians, to ensure that they remained silent. She said during an Israeli election, there was a rare sight of Arabic written on a bus. However, it was not a welcome sign as the message written on the bus was that if people did not vote for a certain political party, they could see more Arabic around them.

According to Shibli, to ensure silence, the colonial powers used the strategy of weakening the language of their ‘subjects’. Citing examples of many countries, she made the point that the oppressors desired to inculcate this idea in the minds of those they ruled over that the native language of that area was inferior to the language of the rulers.

To explain the power of speech, she discussed the character of Scheherazade in the Arabian nights, who had to tell a story for 1,000 nights to ensure that she remained alive.

She said sometimes silence came to authors as a result of some incident, after which they stop writing. She recalled that once prominent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish stopped writing and when he was asked during that period what he had been doing, he answered, “I am writing my silence”.

Commenting on the options creative individuals had when they found themselves under oppression, she quoted a dialogue from James Joyce’s ‘The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’: “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.”

A moving talk

Writer Noorul Huda Shah was the second keynote speaker at the ceremony. She said she was sad after seeing that the number of people at the festival was lesser than what she wanted.

She appealed to the people to come to such events, if not for themselves then for their next generations, lest they may intellectually and emotionally die.

Lamenting the degradation of society, the author said she felt that she and everyone around her had been dead. “For seventy years, we have not come out of the struggle to be able to speak,” she lamented.

“If such a day comes when the ruler would say I agree with the words penned down by writers and poets, no power would be able to have anyone disappeared.”

According to Noorul Huda, intolerance had risen to such levels around us that often we found no option other than communicating our ideas in an indirect manner.

She said Pakistan was much more than what we saw in the urban centres of Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi. It was the country of many who were barefoot and we needed to connect with them and own them, she added.

Commenting on the recent protests in India after the promulgation of the new citizenship laws, she said the Indians were owning their fellow countrymen of minority religions, due to which they have taken to the streets against the state.

In India, the non-Muslims have stood up against the oppression against Muslims but in our country they are the Muslims who are reluctant to speak for the oppressed Muslims and it was a very unfortunate situation, she remarked.

According to the speaker, it was absurd to discuss solutions to the economic crisis when “we were not willing to own each other”. Using Ghalib’s line ‘Aadmi ko bhi muyassar nahin insaan hona’, she explained that “when we distance ourselves from other human beings, we cease to be humans”.

Expressing concerns over the exploitation of religious sentiments of people by the clergy, she said “we are like France of 1761 when a man committed suicide but a mob accused his father of killing him, alleging that the father was against Catholicism and his son wanted to convert to it”. The father, she said, was tried for murder and executed but later it was found that the son had committed suicide because he wanted to be a lawyer but as per the law, he could not become it as he was not a Catholic. She said when great French writer Voltaire came to know about the story, he campaigned against the injustice and it was admitted that the father had been unjustly sentenced to death. Arts Council president Ahmed Shah, Adab Festival founders Ameena Saiyid and Asif Farrukhi, festival director Shayma Saiyid and Karachi Commissioner Iftikhar Shallwani also addressed the ceremony, following which there was a dance performance.