Today is the birthday of Palestinian revolutionary and author Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated by Mossad in 1972. He would be 85 today. Kanafani has been a massive influence on me over the past year or two, and I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about him. In my opinion, Kanafani remains as one of the best examples of how art and its use can be ever relevant and necessary for revolutionary politics. He never took part in the armed struggles often waged by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, of which he was a member, but instead waged his war for liberation against Zionist Settler Colonialism in the hearts and minds of not only the people of Palestine, but people all over the world. This attitude was exemplified in one of his most famous quotes: ‘The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era’. As As’ad AbuKhalil writes in his look back on Kanafani’s life, he noted that ‘Kanafani never tired of explaining the Palestinian cause to anyone who asked.’ And aside from explaining the cause to people from across the world, Kanafani used both his work as an artist and as a writer for the PFLP newspaper Al Hadaf (The Target) in order to bring art and raise consciousness within the wider Arab population. For most people, art and politics may certainly cross paths, but could remain autonomous from one another. Not so for Kanfani, who said:
‘My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.’
This is statement most artists who consider themselves left-wing could get behind. But there are lessons from Kanafani’s life and work that we must learn from. Whilst political art has always been praised an effective form of raising consciousness (as can be seen in one of the most famous examples; Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator’s Epic Theatre), political art is not necessarily revolutionary art, or political art made towards the arm of political or social revolution. Most political art remains within the boundaries of the commodity form, produced according to a timeline aiming for sales, achieved through calculated releases or performances to gain the most engagement and profit (though these are not always the same thing). They become events unto themselves. Revolutionary art is produced alongside political action and agitation, to compliment and articulate the historical processes that have produced it, as well as its ultimate aims. Making culture an important part of national libertation finds its most eloquent expression Amilcar Cabral’s speech National Liberation and Culture, wherein he states:
the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country.
Cabral is speaking on culture across society, specifically an African society (Guinea-Bissau), but he expresses the importance of using cultural means that are immediate to the people alongside popular, democratic forms of political organisation. Not only most art be for the people, it must be available and familiar to them. And through his writing, Ghassan found ways in which a political struggle could be represented in popular form, and throughout his life he wrote with the purpose of creating art that would highlight the oppression of the Palestinian people, and illuminate the situation for his readers. In his classic Men in the Sun, he demonstrates through the story how the Palestinian people have been produced as refugees by the Israelis, and the legal & bureaucratic limits upon that status. In another short story, The Land of Sad Oranges he uses the form to make the Nakba (The Catastrophe) present as it has been a presence in the identities & political situation of Palestinians for the past 73 years. Whatever the story, it was written about and for Palestinians, for the purpose of Palestinian socialism. As his sister recalled:
‘Just the previous day Lamees had asked her uncle to reduce his revolutionary activities and to concentrate more upon writing his stories. She had said to him, “Your stories are beautiful,” and he had answered, “Go back to writing stories? I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty. If I were to leave behind my principles, you yourself would not respect me.” He was able to convince the girl that the struggle and the defense of principles is what finally leads to success in everything.’
This type of commitment and artistic expression is very rare in Western countries. Western Artists (in some industries more than others) feel a strong revulsion when it comes to being attached to a political organisation. It’s one thing to turn up to protests or movements, but to declare yourself part of an organisation, to make art purely for the cause of that organisation? Personally I think a lot of artists see that as reducing themselves, a limit placed upon their genius. Artists have a habit of seeking autonomy from the people. But as Cedric Robinson spoke of Renegade Intellectuals in Black Marxism, ‘always we must remember that their brilliance was also derivative. The truer genius was in the midst of the people of whom they wrote. There the struggle was more than words or ideas but life itself.’
By divorcing oneself from the people with whom you are immersed in, you not only cut yourself off from the base of your “genius”, but you also deny yourself the position where you can use political art the most effectively. In the struggle you can make art not as a single, neatly wrapped piece of political art, but instead you can use art as pieces, weapons & tools within a political process. Recall Walter Benjamin’s description of anti-art in the 1920s, where ‘From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’ Art in a political sense should too become bullets with which we disrupt the dominant cultural representations of oppressed peoples, and the power dynamics & social relations which keep them oppressed.
And from that initial rupture the artwork has the potential to gain an international quality, because by representing the political situation within a particular area or moment, you present the local dialectical matrixes which are part of a much a larger system, which Kanafani and the PFLP recognised as being the senior partner partner to Israel without which it could not maintain power: World Imperialism. This is why Palestine is the cause of every revolutionary, because it is there that the processes by which Israel maintains imperialism’s interests in the Middle East can be revealed. This is another reason that artists likely do not attach themselves to such causes. We like our work to be complete, or sit comfortably within the appearance of completion, self contained. But within an international struggle against imperialism, art must admit to only represent part of the situation, and eventually must become part of the struggle if it wishes to continue to represent and illustrate it accurately. To quote Kanafani again:
Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the world revolution.
So our art must be internationalist and anti-imperialist as well, if we want it to have the effectiveness we desire. For an example of this just on the level of form and content, see the National Theatre’s 2016 production of Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry. For another example, we can look to AbuKhalil’s description of Kanafani’s work with Al-Hadaf:
He made Arab Marxist revolutionary ideas cool and trendy, unlike the boring media of the Lebanese Communist Party. He combined art with literature and information, all for the purpose of the liberation of Palestine. The magazine was also keen on transparency: it published all the financial contributions it received from around the world. Sometimes they were money transfers from Arab students in Western countries (before that was banned as an act of terrorism) to donations in kind from poor residents of the Palestinian refugee camps.
This is not to say that everyone who isn’t making political art is some sort of coward. What I propose is not necessarily an easy thing, to commit oneself to a cause. Kanafani himself was killed doing the same. But given the current circumstances, where imperialism maintains a tight grip on the world, and restrictions on a domestic level in many places are tightening further, it is not simply enough to make one or two pieces about politics, or to make art with a general sense of political or social consciousness. We must move beyond political art into revolutionary art. Our art must be the blending of many different parts, being part educational, part histography, part tradition, part avant-garde, committing itself in all areas to raising consciousness. As Cabral states ‘it is important not to lose sight of the fact that no culture is a perfect finished whole. Culture, like history, is an expanding and developing phenomenon.’ Contingent to change, culture requires that we intervene and make it a revolutionary culture, and it can only do that through an art which makes itself part of the liberating social processes of revolution. These are the lessons I think we can learn from Kanafani. This is not a perfect or total analysis and I encourage anyone who reads it to engage and think critically about what I have said. For now, I will leave you with a poem written for Kanafani after his death, and the path it lays out for us as artists:
Ghassan, when the hatred of the enemy exploded, your life ended.
They thought that in killing you, they had disrupted our path.
Instead, our determination to continue along that path increased,
The pen in one hand and the gun in the other
Your presence among us increases every day.
Ghassan, we remember well and never forget
That the path is not easy and that few are worthy of it.
Ghassan, we remember well that you are the one who said,
“He is wrong who says that we are the generation of revolution.
Rather we are the generation who will give it life.”
And the homeland which you were far from,
You were the closest of people to it
The homeland in which you should have been living,
Was living in you.
You were the homeland,
You were the revolution,
You were the pen and the gun.
