The Isle Of Polyphemus
>
>by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
>
>It was a startling image, unexpected and unsolicited but, there it was,
>instantly replete. Incisive, summative, it offered itself as an
>irresistible metaphor that Monday afternoon, our first full day in
>Ramallah, at the checkpoint where the road had been cut, and dwellers
>of, and visitors to that city were obliged to disembark from their
>vehicles, cross the checkpoint on foot, and take up a different
>transportation on the other side of the guttered road. A raucous,
>potentially explosive junction where traders had set up an instant
>market, mostly in fruits, snacks and refreshing drinks. A young man in a
>bizarre colourful outfit, with a makeshift bandolier in which plastic
>cups were tucked for rapid dispensation of his ware observed my
>fascination and offered me a drink. I had not changed any money so I
>could not even afford one if I wished - as I patiently explained to him.
>But that did not bother him in the least. He had decided that I should
>have a drink, and he doled it out, free of charge.
>
>No, that was not the image that summed up the Israeli-Palestinian visit
>for me; this was the benign face of our experience - an eager, warm and
>hospitable embrace, a need above all, to connect with outside humanity
>and be reassured that the world had not forgotten this terrain of deadly
>attrition. The crucial image offered itself on our way back from Bir
>Zeit University. Exiting Ramallah, we did what everyone else did -
>disembark from our buses at the checkpoint - deserted by Israeli
>soldiers, as it had become a focal point for attacks . We negotiated the
>concrete blocks, crossed the deep gutter that had been cut across the
>tarmac and entered taxis organised by our hosts. On return, it was the
>same routine - taxis from the university campus, cross the check-point
>with a human motley - workers, students, professors, peasants, doctors,
>nurses, school pupils etc - walk to the rowdy improvised motor park,
>there to await the buses that had dropped us off in the first place. And
>that was when the telling image was vividly enacted.
>
>A truck arrived at the motor park and then, instead of disgorging human
>beings or goods, out came a flock of dense-fleece sheep, prodded by
>their keeper. We watched as the shepherd began to herd his flock - no,
>not along the road but down the stone and scrub valley that sheered off
>just where the road executed a deep armpit curve. Was this a short cut
>acrosss to his destination, taking to country tracks to arrive at
>another town or village, or did he merely wish to let the sheep graze a
>little before seeking a new conveyance on the other side? We did not
>remain long enough to find out. What did happen however was that I
>received an instant flash - Ulysses among the Cyclops, trapped in the
>cave of the one-eyed Polyphemus.
>
>Let us recall some fabulous details of that adventure tale, several
>aspects of which began to take on sobering parallels. Ulysses had sought
>shelter for himself and his men in the cave of that gigantesque host
>but, having brought them into his home, Polyphemus proceeded to dine
>serially off his guests, sealing them in with the aid of a huge boulder
>which all the combined strength of the Ulysses band could not shift.
>Ulysses took his revenge while Polyphemus was asleep, preparing his bid
>for freedom by driving a sharpened and heated log into the single eye of
>their cannibal captor. The only question that remained was - how to
>escape from the cave.
>
>Now let us recollect also that Ulysses, with his usual cautious guile,
>had not given his real name to his genial host but had introduced
>himself as - No-man. When the fiery stake sizzled in the giantfs eye in
>the dead of night and he bellowed out his pain, his fellow Cyclops ran
>to his aid, demanding who or what had caused his anguish. dNo-man is the
>villainf replied Polyphemus again and again. So his neighbours were
>thoroughly disgusted, advised him to seek a cure for his nightmares and
>retreated to their own caves. If no man is tormenting you, they cursed,
>why do you disturb our sleep?
>
>Came dawn, Ulysses and his rovers remained sealed within the cave,
>waiting for Polyphemus to roll aside the rock, which he was obliged to
>do in order to let his sheep out to graze. But the pain-crazed giant
>still had enough wit left to open the cave just wide enough for the
>sheep to exit singly, sweeping any spare space with his vast hands and
>over each sheep to ensure that no one was riding on its back. Wily
>Ulysses had of course tied his men under the belly of each animal.
>Polyphemus caressed his woolly companions, whispered endearments to
>them, but missed his quarry to the last man. So far, so instructive? Now
>we come to the even more dangerous part.
>
>Once seaborne, Ulysses could not resist taunting his foe, screaming
>abuses at the giant. In a fury of the thwarted, Polyphemus flung huge
>lumps of rock in the direction of that needling voice, setting off a
>virtual tidal wave that nearly succeeded in swamping his tormentors. Too
>late. The bird had flown. Ulysses - had he so chosen - could have
>returned and stung the blinded Polyphemus again and again. And
>Polyphemus would uproot all the rocks - a prominent feature of
>Palestinian terrain, dazzling white - and fling them blindly in the
>direction of his assailant, miss him completely but provoke one deluge
>after another that would threaten to innundate the world and drown all
>its innocent inhabitants.
>
>The facelessness of No-man - so many of them, and of all ages and both
>sexes - is what enrages the government of Israel, and its current
>leader, for whom the evocation of the figure of Polyphemus - even
>physically - could not be more apt. In the process of exacting vengeance
>on its enemy, it has adopted tactics that will either set off a tidal
>wave to drown the world or, more aptly, set it on fire. Unable to
>identify and strike pre-emptively at its elusive enemy, but determined
>to identify a target, focus the attention of the world on that target,
>place a name and a face on the invisible body of Satan, Ariel Sharon has
>chosen to obssess himself with the merely plausible but, in truth,
>merely convenient and reductionist identity - Yasser Arafat - which is
>why failure is being dressed up as reason and frustration as factual
>knowledge. We know who our tormentor is, shouts Sharon, echoed by the
>government of the United States, and it is none other than Yasser
>Arafat.
>
>Arafat! Arafat! Arafat! Long before there was the likelihood of my
>venturing near the cave of Polyphemus, I had found myself shaken to the
>foundations of reason that anyone with the slightest intelligence, with
>even a minimal grasp of the psychology of humiliation and desperation,
>could exhibit such inanity as to imagine that, within the context of the
>Middle East conflict, any one individual, no matter how highly respected
>by his followers, how sacrosant his authority, could control a form of
>action that stemmed out of both collective and individual desperation
>and trauma. And of course Yasser Arafat is simply not in control of the
>many arms the Palestinian resistance. Not even the various groups can
>boast absolute control over individual acts of determination and
>resourcefulness. Timothy MacVeigh took over two hundred souls down in
>one fell swoop. No one has attempted to heap on the President of the
>pro-gun lobby the sole responsibility for MacVeighfs homicidal resolve
>to avenge the victims of Waco.
>
>Nor indeed - and this I had cause to point out on a number of occasions
>during our visit - nor did anyone hold the Prime Minister of Israel
>responsible for the action, many years ago, of the military reservist, a
>medical doctor, who opened fire on a congregation of Moslem worshippers
>in a mosque, killing a score or more before turning the gun on himself.
>The irrationalities of the Israeli government and the United States have
>been mind-boggling - they would be ludicrous if they were not fraught
>with such predictable tragic consequences. Their insistence for
>instance, at the early stages of the recent intifada, that the
>Palestinians observe at least a week of violence-free moratorium before
>peace talks could begin, was surely apparent to all beings with a claim
>to reasoning - except those two world leaders - as a demand of
>unbelievable infantilism, long before Sharon recognised and acknowledged
>its futility. What my brief stay among ordinary Palestinians did was
>simply to compel me to revisit that, and allied policy statements by the
>Israeli government, promoted with such galling insensitivity by the
>United States government. If I took anything away from our visit,
>personally, it was the intensification of my private terror that so much
>critical interventionism in world affairs actually rests in the hands of
>such leaders with limitless military power.
>
>No, there was no revelation, not for me. Months ago, in an article in
>ENCARTA AFRICANA, I used the expression that the Israeli government was
>tearing out the heart and liver of Arafat and feeding them to his
>children - and who could fail to predict the consequences of such
>evisceration! What I obtained last week was a reinforcement of what had
>been a source of marvel, and it made me truly afraid for the Israeli -
>that many of those who ever believed that their political leader was
>treading the right political path had simply never taken the trouble to
>project their minds into the refugee camps of the Palestinians, into
>their daily existence, even if they could not visit the physical
>reality, experience at first hand the daily humiliation and the scars of
>memory that fully spell out the condition of nearly all Palestinians
>today.
>
>We saw the checkpoints through which thousands of Palestinian Arabs pass
>in order to go to work daily at their sole economic source - Israel. We
>were trapped within endless motor convoys through which Palestinians
>pass daily to and from work - that is, twice a day. Those convoys
>reminded me of my own country, Nigeria, between the first military coup
>and the Biafran Civil War, and its immediate aftermath. It recalled the
>faces of despair, resignation, but also the simmering anger of a
>populace that faced daily humiliation at the hands of an arrogant
>military. This sense of humiliation in Palestine was just as palpable -
>you could touch it, measure it and weigh it. It found expression in
>numerous ways - from the ordinary people in the streets, men, women and
>children, to university lecturers and students, NGOs , writers and civil
>leaders. It was affirmed by foreigners who were compelled to share the
>lives of the Palestinians, including the staff of the United Nations
>refugee organisation, UNRWA. Numerous were the accounts of women who
>gave birth at checkpoints because of the inflexible control that was
>exercised over the movements of ordinary people, of deaths that occurred
>right within ambulances that were trapped in convoys or at checkpoints.
>And of course we crunched mortar beneath our feet, picked our way
>through the rubble of demolished houses and saw, without any varnishing,
>the active policy of land encroachment by settlers - demolish, create a
>no-manfs land, then move into the vacated space when the Palestinian
>occupants had been harassed beyond the range of guns. These instances of
>dispossession, and their chilling methodology, have been meticulously
>recorded by UN agencies, foreign embassies and external visitors. The
>evidence itself was overwhelming, indisputable.
>
>Was I sufficiently detached during this visit? Of course. And then
>again, of course not. It is not possible to take only a clinical,
>objective view of the situation in Palestine. When human beings are
>being blown up in restaurants, in hotels, and especially with a
>singularly grotesque sense of timing - while sitting down to a holy
>feast, such as the Passover - one experiences both rage and horror at
>the perpetrators. Matyrdom is an abuse of the word when allied to the
>murder of innocents. If there are no innocents in any struggle, then let
>us give up the cause of humanity. My skin crawls whenever I hear the
>expression dmatyrdomf used as an equivalent of murder by suicide, and
>especially mass murder. And on the other side of terror, the state
>variety, to listen to a family give a graphic account of tanks crashing
>through their walls at night, bringing down mortar on sleeping members
>of the household, crushing innocents in their sleep, it is equally
>impossible to remain viscerally disengaged or fail to be morally
>assaulted. These had been homes to these innocents for generations. Now
>they are being turned breeding grounds for a new species of the biped -
>the dehumanised.
>The devastating shock waves continue. The horrors that have become daily
>diet for both contestants in this ominous conflict were brought home to
>me even more drastically only two days ago - Easter Sunday - from the
>comparative safety of California where I read about the latest outrage
>in Tel-Aviv. The name of the street rang a bell. The explosion appears
>to have taken place in a cafe on the same street that Russell Banks
>(president of the IPW) and I had gone for an despresso fixf while
>waiting to meet Shimon Peres, having driven directly from Gaza very
>early on Wednesday morning for that appointment. It could have been that
>very cafe - I am still to find out. In the meantime however, the sharp,
>yet wistful features of the friendly young girl who served the coffee
>had leapt instantly to my retina, an image that remains stubbornly
>superimposed on it. Has she become yet another statistic of the purblind
>peevishness of Polyphemus?
>--
>======
>
>We must organize against the seige of Palestinian people by the
>Israeli army. Our silence implicates us in the genocide.