Today’s readings made me reflect upon some of the themes we’ve encountered in our exploration of partition literature. My focus rested largely on this idea of an imagined space vs. the reality of a space, as it was presented in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Reading Rachel Corrie’s e-mails and Said’s essay forced me to confront how Americans imagine Arabs and how they actually are. It is important to remember in this hyper-mediaized age that everything we see and here does not reality make. We have to remember to hang onto our doubts and value our skeptical natures. We have to question those who deem “Arabs an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary” (Said). Everything we have read contradicts this racist idea, and in fact, portrays a portion of humanity caught in the political machinations of the world. Said strikes at the heart of matters when he asks that “dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.”
That is what makes Corrie’s e-mails so provocative and powerful. An average, modern American is able to see through the convoluted political web to the families and communities being ripped apart over questions of borders and boundaries. One of the most powerful moments for me is when Corrie wrote, “just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop” (56). Corrie wrote this from one woman to another, from one potential mother to another mother. I found myself tearing up at the thought. I would never want my daughter to come to know these things about the world we live in. And Corrie as much as said that exact thing when she wrote, “This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me” (56). But unfortunately that is exactly what we need to have happen — the average American has to wise up to the world.
That Rachel Corrie, like Said, valued universal skepticism and "the importance of independent critical thinking" above all else is what makes me think that she is more than just a naive and vain American who wanted to save the world. That idea that we tossed around in class has been bothering me. She did want things to change, and wanted (perhaps idealistically) to help change happen, but the fear contained in her emails shows that she didn't think herself immune to danger. I think she wanted to be a representative of humanity in a horrifically war-torn place. Obviously, the fact that she is American is important because she was protesting actions of her government and hoping to exert influence as an American, but her humanity should be matter more than her American-ness. Who knows what she was thinking when she stepped in front of that bulldozer? Maybe she chose to believe, with idealistic ignorance (or innocence?), that because she was American she wouldn't be killed. But I think it more likely that she knew if she didn't do everything within her power to help this Palestinian family, she would feel irrevocably guilty. And she already knew what guilt felt like.
ReplyDeleteHad she not died, her inspiring belief in the potential power of human coalescence, and in the resilient human spirit would not be so widely disseminated and she would not have raised so much American awareness of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But she still would have made a difference to a few Palestinian families. In the end, I think that's what she was after.