Divine Intervention Article 1

Divine Intervention: in his latest award winning film Divine Intervention, Palestinian director, Elia Suleiman, uses humour to highlight the painful absurdity of life under Israeli occupation. (Mosaic).
Article from:
The Middle East
Article date:
February 1, 2003
Author:
Andrews, Beverly

Elia Suleiman takes the central role of E.S. in Divine Intervention, playing the son of a Palestinian businessman living in Jerusalem. E.S's ordered life is completely shattered when his father, in a futile attempt at breaking a chain of petty feuds, collapses with a heart attack. E.S. finds his life is now divided between daily trips to the hospital to visit his ailing father and trying to maintain his relationship with a Palestinian woman living in Ramallah. But even travel is no longer simple in present day Israel and E.S.'s life is now filled with the same frustration suffered by so many Palestinians as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a normal existence while living in the middle of chaos. E.S.'s life is further complicated by the fact that his Ramallah-based lover cannot enter Jerusalem, so their meetings must take place in a deserted lot next to an Israeli checkpoint.
The film mixes the surreal with brutal reality. We witness the reality of the daily lives of Palestinians living under occupation and learn of their aspirations for `normality'. One scene shows a long line of cars at an Israeli security checkpoint. The queue of cars appears to stretch for miles with their drivers sitting in resigned silence. E.S.'s lover daydreams of simply walking past the guards in her high heels and designer clothes, leaving them speechless in her wake. At another point in the film when E.S. and his lover are seated in his car, he fantasises about blowing up a balloon with the face of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat on the front. As the balloon floats above the heads of the security guards they are torn between trying to shoot it down or simply standing and watching it as it floats away. By the time they have made a decision to shoot it down it is too late, the balloon is gently gliding away towards the heart of Jerusalem.

Because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Elia Suleiman chose to shoot Divine Intervention in Paris, at an army camp. Bizarrely, filming coincided with a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an irony which did not escape the attention of Suleiman. "While I was destroying Israeli tanks on set, a demonstration against the visit of Ariel Sharon was taking place in Paris," he recalled, going on to lament the general apathy which, he feels, surrounds any Palestinian protest.

Shot in the form of a Buster Keaton silent comedy Divine Intervention not only highlights the tragicomic aspects of life under occupation but also looks at the peculiar situation many Palestinians living within the borders of Israel now find themselves in. Suleiman observes: "We Palestinians living in Israel, are the shy ones. The inhibited. We act as if we're closet-case Palestinians. Our sisters and brothers in the West Bank and Gaza generally ignite uprisings first, and then we join in ... it is our sisters and brothers who keep reminding us of our silent and tragic existence."

As the film progresses its tone gradually changes from one of gentle humour to that of simmering anger. Perhaps the most controversial moment in the narrative occurs when Israeli soldiers use a cardboard cut-out of a female suicide bomber for target practice only to rind the figure magically comes to life. She then turns into an avenging warrior, who takes on the squadron and wins. The sequence is disturbing but in the context of the film it translates as a desire to feel empowered, rather than a cry for violence or revenge.

Divine Intervention is a remarkable and thought provoking account of life in a war zone. The film shows the daily violence many now take for granted and the overall sense of humiliation Palestinians experience on a daily basis, as well as highlighting the ability human beings have to adapt to almost any way of life. But Divine Intervention also suggests that the prevailing situation cannot go on forever. The final symbolic scene in the film shows E.S. and his mother sitting inside their home watching a pressure cooker as it overflows.

Elia Suleiman
Born in Nazareth in 1960, Elia Suleiman moved to New York in 1981 where he lived until 1993. While in the US he was a frequent guest lecturer at universities, art institutions and museums. His first two short films, Introduction to the End of an Argument (1992) and Homage By Assassination (1993), won widespread recognition and numerous awards. The recipient of the Rockefeller Award for work achievement, his articles have been published in Arabic, English and French.
Suleiman returned to Jerusalem in 1994, with a commission from the European Community to found a film and media department at Bir Zeit University. His first feature Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) was awarded the Best Debut Feature Prize at the 1996 Venice Film Festival. Since then Suleiman has directed two short works, The Arab Dream (1998) and Cyber Palestine (2000) and co-directed the feature length documentary War and Peace in Vesoul, with Israeli director Amos Gitai.

A. "Divine Intervention: in his latest award winning film Divine Intervention, Palestinian director, Elia Suleiman, uses humour to highlight the painful absurdity of life under Israeli occupation. (Mosaic)." The Middle East. IC Publications Ltd. 2003. HighBeam Research. 17 Dec. 2009 .

First Impressions on the Narrator

    First off, I wonder if Prya doesn’t have some particular interest in narrator, as this is the third book that does something interesting with the narrator. The first, “Cracking India” gave us this split adult/child non-fiction-based narrator. The second, “Out of Place,” was a memoir with the central character as scholarly narrator, but lacked, for the most part, the intimacy of a memoir, held at arm’s length as we were as readers. And finally, we get this anonymous, but seemingly incongruously, intimate narrator. Why anonymous? Is it to suggest that this narrator’s experience is not unique and that s/he and family could be substituted for any other Irish family?
    The narrator of “Reading in the Dark” reminds me of the narrator in “Cracking India” in that it is this split child/adult narrator. However, in “Reading in the Dark” I hear the adult in the child narrator’s recollections not through blatantly stated judgments as in “Cracking India,” but rather in the selection and shaping of the presentation of the child’s memories. Overall, Deane keeps the language simpler (there are no globules here) and presents the child’s memories as the child would remember them, in the simple things, like the shoes gathered around the table the night his little sister died:
    “I recognized Uncle Manus’s brown shoes: the heels were worn down and he was
    moving back and forward a little. Uncle Dan and Uncle Tom had identical shoes,
    heavy and rimed with mud and cement, because they had come from the building
    site in Creggan. Dan’s shoes were dirtier, though, because Tom was the foreman.
    But they weren’t good shoes” (Feet, pg. 13).
By choosing to share this childhood recollection the adult narrator tells readers that this was a family crisis, as even the men were crying. And that Irishmen were in this together, because no matter what your station, foreman or grunt, you were all still equally fucked. 
    So in “Reading in the Dark” we get this extremely self-conscious narrator, as in “Out of Place,” where Said was obviously conscious of his position and notoriety in the literary world as he shaped his memoir. However, in “Reading in the Dark” it is not the adult who primarily tells the story, but rather an adult sharing his childhood memories as if s/he were there again. Thus, there is none of the verbal posturing of Sidhwa’s “Cracking India.”
    In fact, the narrator shares the “theory” behind the construction of his story by showing us a simple childhood scene that profoundly impacted the narrator as a writer. The narrator described the puffed up tale he intended to share with his classmates to the one about a boy and his mother patiently waiting for a weary-worn father to come home for a quiet supper and evening repose. Though the narrator acquiesces the superiority of the latter over the former, he can’t resist pointing out that the underbelly of his classmate’s simple tale has to be told by someone, hence, the adult-side of the narrator, which is necessary to point out the hidden subtexts in the child narrator’s experiences. 
    So without directly saying it, like Said did in the opening of “Out of Place,” Seamus’s narrator enters into a contract with us, explaining the “why” behind the split narrator, as Sidhwa did not. Each choice produced a different effect. Sidhwa perhaps wanted her readers to fell discombobulated and distorted as her narrator’s identity was cracked, but Seamus seems to wants us to trust his narrator, as if he were inviting us to be co-conspirators.

Pictures of Derry 2009

I can't help it

Every time Edward says something of a Debbie-downerish nature about how pathetic he feels, I can't help but hear Eor's voice in my head:

"Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water.

'Pathetic,' he said. 'That's what it is. Pathetic.'
He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.
'As I thought,' he said. 'No better from this side. But nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that's what it is.'"

Obliviousness

    It is virtually unbelievable that somebody who “experienced” the loss of Palestine could have been so ignorant of the actual event as Said was. Being unaware of the forced expulsion of a people seems an impossible state to achieve, but thanks to the overprotectiveness of his parents, Said did. In chapter 6 he said he was “scarcely conscious” and essentially an “unknowing witness” of the “scale of dislocation” Palestinian refugees experienced. And I had to ask if this was just another item in a long list of disservices committed by Said’s parents. We’ve seen a lot of questionable parenting out of Said’s guardians, but surprisingly I could not add Said’s obliviousness to that list. 
    As a parent, if I had the wealth and the power to shield my children from the kinds of atrocities committed in partition then I certainly would bring my full influence to bear. So though we may find fault with much of Said’s upbringing, I cannot see how he would have benefited from being exposed to such tragic events as a child. Had his family openly shared their feelings of dislocation and confusion over the loss of home and culture he likely would not have benefited. Said was a teenager during this time, and already struggling with identity formation (the primary concern of the teenage years). Adding the expulsion of Palestine to the mix could have crippled his efforts, his identity being so much in flux as it already was.
    And Said was not completely oblivious to these events. He saw first hand the suffering of the Palestinian refugees and it obviously made a lasting impression on him. He was a “second hand” witness to these events kept at a distance as he was by his parents, but perhaps this distance was necessary to tell this story. This distance gives him an objectiveness or scholarly perspective on the loss of Palestine. Not caught up in the actual events Said perhaps gained perspective on the situation and was able to focus on what really mattered: the human cost. All he sees is the misery and suffering of a displaced people and he does not get caught up in the political and social machinations that prompted the events.
    Confused by the events of “Out of Place” I attempted to do some research online. Nearly every article I found about Palestine on Wikipedia was qualified with a statement about the questionable objectivity of the entry. None of them mentioned the things Said did: the worry lines in the faces of the refugees, the destitute and begging children, the joblessness, and desperate need for medical care.  So though we do not see the actual event of partition in Said’s memoir as we did in Sidhwa’s first-hand fictional account, having left the hot button political issues out the reader takes Said’s perspective and focuses on what is important — the people.

"Out of Place" by Hypenated American Standards

I've been knocking some ideas around in my head about this novel and what it truely means to be "out of place", either within a country, within social standards, and/or even within familial relations. I find the Edward/"Edward" dynamic interesting (and I will kill myself for mentioning this, but I feel that blogs are here for us to spill out thoughts with disregard to find our paths to intellectual enlightenment through developing connections between ourselves and the culture that rules us. Us, being Americans, are hopelessly infatuated with pop culture whether we find it vulgar or otherwise. Stating that, can I interject a monkeywrench and say that I can't help but think of the friggin' Twilight saga whenever I see Edward and "Edward" pop in my head? I'm not a Twilight fan AT ALL but I can't seem to get away from it and I know it probably may work with what I'm trying to work out in my mind in regarda to feeling and even embodying the notion of being "in" or "out" of a place). Wow, that's a long tangent, but I'll see what I can do.
I'll begin with the hypenated "-American" aspect that I came across while surfing the net on my mobile while awaiting test results at my doctor's office. I found an article that I found somewhat intellectually stimulating regarding the memoir and the correlation between the US's relationship with the Middle East in the wake of 9/11. Now, the article (the website I will post at the end of my train of thought, so as to not get lost on the way to hopefully finding some sort of understanding) names a few instances in which being an Arab-American in the wake of 9/11 is to be completely cut off from the overall culture (the music, the art, the language, the various religious customs, etc.) so as to conform to ultimate American-ness, and yet be completely cut off from the American side of that hypenation, either by choice or by outside force. The article has an interesting quote that is published at an interesting time: in April 2003, a quote shows up stating that "Now is the best time to be Arab-American". Not even 2 years after 9/11 and barely a few days after the fall of Baghdad, after hardships have arisen among those Arab natives as well as American-born descendents of Arabs, and its the best time to be Arab-American? I'm not so sure, but then again I'm not at all political, so who knows, maybe certain backlash and hardships makes the heart... well, heartier. I find this puzzling, as Said's memoir seems so melancholic in juxtaposition to that statement. Being "Out of Place" in so many cultures is the integral theme of the book, yet this statement seems to sort of call attention to both aspects of the hypenation despite the fact that now these people were targets, especially in the wake of 9/11. As "Americans" the hypenated bunch are to reject their native culturebut the ghost of "Arab" still looms above them and they are isolated from American culture. No matter what, they are out of place among the familiar and the distantly familiar, a reconciliation that seems out of reach. Does this seem like a good time to be anything that is torn from the roots of existing as a cultural driving force, and yet divided and obliterated within the realm of social commentary? I suppose it can be debated amongst those that debate what is P.C. or not (ie. America is for everyone, but not those who threaten the idea of an established America, and we will racially profile anyone who remotely looks like our idea of a terrorist through our mysterious "findings"). And I find it funny how now such things are ingrained in our pop culture, Bin Laden parodied on South Park and Family Guy as well as other satires, so as to perpetuate the idea of separating yet combining fundamental ideas through stereotypes, a common ground for everybody. The only thing is, how can we get rid of the hyphen and the adjective of a distinguishing nationality and become one nationality under a single umbrella moniker? Or, does this concept only apply to winning gold medals at the Olympic Games? Oh, is that my inner voice?
Here is the article website just in case you wanted to look over it: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-16192242/edward-said-out-place.html

Palestine a Borderland?

I was surprised to find so many connections between “What is Eastern Europe? A Philosophical Approach” and Edward Said’s memoir “Out of Place.” The two pieces are inherently about different places, but the notion of borderlands, and the borderland self translates to Said’s struggle with identity and the confusion over Palestine itself, ‘a place that no longer exists.’ (Said xi)
“Out of Place” begins with the invention of “Edward” a role that the author continuously found himself distant from. The inner Edward, was not the American Edward his parents wanted him to be. He was an Arab in colonial schools, and a blatant falsity at the American school with his plain white socks. And so he felt. According to Sushytska’s framework, for Edward, the “other” was within the self, the “non-west” within the west. (Sushytska 11)
Similarly, at the beginning of his book Said states, “I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt.” (Said 4) This contradicts what Merleau-Ponty says about language (cited in Sushytska’s work), “We may speak several languages, but one of them always remains the one in which we live…” (Sushytska 9) By not knowing his lived language, it becomes more reasonable that Said eventually finds solace by finally acquiring his academic mind as his lived space, but also seemingly impossible.
In “What is Eastern Europe?” three kinds of borderland interaction (Sushytska 8) parallel Said’s awakening of his relationship to his space and identity. In the first stage, young Edward hasn’t acknowledged feeling “Out of Place” as anything more than his personal failure, and doesn’t seem to notice his surroundings as he does when grows older.
The second type of relation to borderlands is one that acknowledges the “spatial forms,” develops attitudes, but is not conscious. Moving outside of the space changes this person. In Said’s memoir I found that his borderland interaction paralleled the differences of his vacationing in Lebanon compared to his life in Cairo, and his level of comfort at his Palestinian school compared to his colonial school.
The third kind of interaction is simply a conscious one. This point in the story is difficult for me to place on an exact moment, but it exerts itself as an articulation of the feelings that have been developing throughout his life.
An interesting point in the story for me was how he found community being a troublemaker with the other Arab boys. It confronted the colonial powers at hand, serving as a microcosm for Egypt at the time. Most striking was when he locked his teacher in the closet, presenting it as a zoo with the Englishman in his “natural state.” This screamed “otherness” to me, (also reminding me of Africans and Native Americans being exhibits in early carnivals), and remained in my memory as a bench mark that got “Edward” to the point of writing “Orientalism.”
The most significant connection I made between “What is Eastern Europe?” and “Out of Place” was the similar conclusions on the formation and reformation of identity. This helped me communicate the refute of nationalism (specifically Zionism) I felt by Said’s peace with himself. “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self…and at their best [the currents], they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ and out of place, but at least they are always in motion…” Sushytska brings up movement (Sushytska 11) and Heraclitus’ idea that the self is continually becoming and re-becoming the self. (Sushytska 3) The nation-state proves the antithesis by being a static form of identity that excludes the other from its strict borders.
The whole book Said is touchingly out of place, but in the end he views this as a good thing, “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.” This borderland identity has given Said a “vantage point” (Sushytska 12) to critique the west and colonialism. Sushytska ends her article with the conclusion that the first step to an Eastern European identity of movement is to confront otherness and admit, “…I am already other to myself…” (Sushytska 14) This is how Said begins and frames his memoir.


As a side note:
Palestine is not a country, (unlike the rabble-rousing advice my father gave me when choosing a subject for my sixth grade country report. My teacher told me I couldn’t do Palestine, that it was part of Israel [which is problematic in itself], and when I asked if I could report on Israel told me no and gave it to student with no backbone.) The geography of Palestine has been overtaken, and Palestinians displaced. More over, Palestinians can be Muslim, or Christian, or originally born in Lebanon like Said’s mother.
So to all of the conservative critics of “Out of Place” who claim that Said didn’t even really live in Palestine blah blah blah….. Conscious identity (see step 3) isn’t limited to a physical space. Sushytska relays the work of Mamardashvili in relation to Diaspora, “…one does not have to be physically present in a borderlands in order to actualize a certain way of being. We can ‘carry’ the place with us precisely because it has become us, and we have become it.” (Sushytska 8) I would argue that Palestine shares characteristics with borderlands in its uncertainty, and its ability as an identity (and specifically a complicated one.)