I will scream in my solitude,
not to wake up the sleeping.
But for my scream to wake me
from my imprisoned imagination!
A country on the verge of dawn,
awaken your horse
and ascend lightly,
lightly
to surpass your dream,
then sit - when the sky paints you –
on a rock and sigh
Mahmoud Darwish
Over the years, many studies have been carried out demonstrating the terrible consequences and effects on Palestinian children of living under the constant violence of Israeli occupation. These effects are not only physical, exposing them on a daily basis to injustice, imprisonment (often just for the Israeli-defined “crime” of throwing stones), humiliation, segregation, and aggressions, but also, just as importantly, psychological and mental.
One aspect of these multiple psychological effects that has been investigated much less, however, has been in the sphere of the imagination. Moreover, of the few studies that have been carried out, most seem to indicate that there has been a widespread destruction of the capacity of children to unconsciously and consciously imagine a future that is in any meaningful way positive. To cite one such study, for example: observing Palestinian children while they play is quite interesting; games are more of a mimic of what is seen in their life, rather than a creation of the mind, where fantasies and dreams can blossom. Children replay the resistance, the intifada, the arrests, and the burials. Although this form of symbolical coping and working through their mourning and grieving process is called resilience, this mechanism to cope comes with a price hampering the imagination. When assessing the situation... it was quite striking to figure out how poor their capacity to project themselves in the future was.
The complex issues that children have to face, it is further contended, make any kind of normal imaginative life an almost impossible challenge. In short, the innocence of their childhood has been dispossessed and effectively destroyed. Indeed, it is almost as though the Palestinian child’s capacity of imagination has been bred (and bled) out of them. The simple and normally easy ability of abstraction, of imagining what their dreams and their future could just be, simply disappears. Bearing the wounds and scars of an intergenerational transmission of past traumas and a present in which they are caught in between anger and prostration, it clearly does make it extremely challenging to have any kind of freedom of imagination that can be of positive use for the future, especially if one considers that for the Israeli occupiers, for a Palestinian to use one’s imagination is itself almost tantamount to a “crime” and a “security threat” that must be punished.
The question I want to pose, however, is this: is this apparent lack of ability to imagine a future in any kind of positive way a phenomenon that is apparent with the young children of Dheisheh? If it is, can a new constructive narrative be used to help create a strong (politically motivated) defense mechanism when dealing with unspeakable traumas and major losses? Can encouragement, and a process of learning, be given to the “anticipatory illuminations” of possible positive futures?
To move away from wounded attachments, loss, and impossibility, and toward a politics invested in future potentiality is the ability to imagine otherwise — to take a risk and let go of the investment in predefined collectives configured in familiar political categories (nation-state, ethnicity, nativity, etc.) and in favor of new and still unrecognizable collectives of the future. After all, there can be little doubt that all communities need to be distinguished not by their falsity or genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined. Using the imagination in the right kind of effective way can be an invaluable power of resistance; perhaps even the most effective form of resistance, especially where the imagination is capable of figuring forth something that is already latent in reality. The education of desire, the disruption of the taken-for-granted present, is implicitly directed to a further end, that of transformation. It is also vital for the personal development and self-awareness of the child. One might almost say: I imagine therefore I am.
No one understood this better than Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, imagination captures possible universes as pure events that escape history: “What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positioning as concept, escapes History.” Becoming requires a certain “leaving behind” of historical preconditions “in order to become, that is, to create something new.” It requires speculating beyond the narrative comfort zone of history's “actuality,” which is held in place by pre-existing, recognizable political terms. This is where imagination comes in. Imagination creates possible universes that escape the limits of history. The imagination intervenes in the possible universe in ways resistant to time. Imagination opens history onto the ahistorical, and resistant to space. It opens the actual universe onto new universes or lands.
To put it in a different way, can one restore the star-charts of children’s imagination? Can imagination be a candle in the dark? Can it be like water for the flowers in the jar? Can it free the wings enabling the capacity of flight up into the sky, and into the stars above, away from the dust of the ground? Can imagination strip away the barbed wire too often wrapped around the heart? Can a positive form of imagination allow children to rest their heads on pillows of comforting hope rather than despair?
What I would like to do, therefore, during my brief stay in Dheisheh — with your permission, help and assistance — is to work with a group of young children and explore their existing capacities of imagination, and in particular to encourage them to develop their imagination into positive liberating channels of desire. This can be done in the form of stories and perhaps in particular through their desire to draw images of how they envisage and how they would like to imagine their future. If a collection of such drawings could be put together, this would then allow me to arrange a small exhibition in my home city of Bologna; a city where there already exists a large Palestinian community and a very committed group of activists and supporters of the Palestinian cause and its struggles of resistance.
With this aim in mind, I am reminded of a story that I encountered during one of my many trips to Latin America. It was told by the great Uruguayan writer and activist, Eduardo Galeano, and is based on a real-life event that happened to one of his comrades. The event takes place in a Uruguayan prison (named “Freedom”!). Political prisoners are not allowed to speak without permission. They are not allowed to whistle, smile, sing, walk quickly, or greet another prisoner. Nor can they draw or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds. Galeano's comrade was a school teacher, who had been tortured and imprisoned for having ‘nonconformist ideological ideas.’
One Sunday, the comrade received a visit from his five-year-old daughter. The daughter brought him a drawing of birds. The censors, however, destroyed it at the entrance of the prison.
On the following Sunday, his daughter brought him another drawing, but this time of trees. The trees were not prohibited, and the drawing passed. The father praised his daughter for the work, and asked about the coloured circles that appeared in the treetops, many small circles between the branches:
— “Are they oranges? What fruits are they?”
The daughter urges him to be quiet:
— “Ssshhhh.”
And secretly explains:
— “Silly. Can’t you see those oranges are really eyes? The eyes of the birds that I secretly brought you and whose wings will get you out of here and carry you back home.”
Reflecting on this story in the specific Israeli-Palestinian context, it is interesting to note how oranges can actually be used by the Israeli occupiers as a weapon to kill, not to metaphorically liberate. While Palestinians feed themselves and their children with oranges, and provide vitamins for their imaginations as well, the Israeli occupiers use them to bomb designated targets by means of booby-trapped trucks transporting the fruit. The most notorious case of this occurred back in 1948 at the very beginning of the Nakba. In Jaffa, Israeli armed groups used oranges to bomb an Islamic orphanage.
As you might have gathered, I grew up and became politically active in a period when one of the main militant slogans was “All Power to the Imagination” and when one dreamed of, and imagined, a future in which our Identity Card would be a flower, and when one could calculate that two plus two could just as easily equal “five”. Notwithstanding the obvious point that imagination can of course also be used for negative ends as well as positive ones, and notwithstanding as well the “philosophical” basis of my beliefs and activities over the course of my own life, I still cling very much to the positive capacity of imagination, especially when encouraged very early on in a child’s life. To quote the words of the poet, Ghassan Zaqtan: Dreams and imagination help us “to author a bend in the story so we can prolong the evening or make predictions and matters bearable.” And it is very appropriate, I think, to conclude with these words of Ghassan. After all, it was his poet-activist father, Khalil Zaqtan, who started the first school in Dheisheh refugee camp.
The world is imagination.
Yet in reality, it is Real.
Whoever understands this
Holds the secrets of the Way.
What you plant here,
You will reap there.
Ibn ‘Arabi