Gathering thoughts about independence and Gaza
Under a twilit sky on the eve of the Indian Independence Day, an assembly gathered along the stairs and ramp of the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to ponder the question of independence. Prof Soumyabrata Choudhury, Shomo, who has just authored his third book with Navayana, Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza, was in conversation with fellow teacher Prof Brahma Prakash.
The audience comprised students and friends, all participating in Shomo’s imagined dialogue with Gaza. There was Shakeel Anjum, author of Politics of Space and the Question of Palestine, a book that facilitated some of the reflections in Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza.
Rakesh, the first reader of Shomo’s tentative speculations, spoke of the dialectic between the local and universal in his opening address. After all, much of the reticence in India about standing with Gaza stems from the abstraction of distances. Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza begins with a fragile premise: to think in the face of unthinkability. Shomo sounded a warning to the audience at the event of the trap of legitimised ways of thinking that the West prides above all. A thinking that is hot and cold at once, alien yet immersive—something like a ‘compassionate genocide’, a concept Shomo and Brahma discussed at length with the audience. Shomo also dwelt on the coincidence that brought him to French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s Camera Eye—a sterile, speculative short film about the war in Vietnam—and how he realised that Godard’s concerns about his distance from Vietnam were still pertinent during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Media society, also sterile and speculative, blocks the process of thinking while producing the shock of thought. Which is why, Shomo reasoned, media society works against the logic of making a film like Godard’s about Gaza.
Meanwhile, the impasse of independence deepens. The international system of states, incapable of being a community unlike people, reinforces its cruelty while being garbed in humanitarian rhetoric. From aid that kills to relentless bombardment, this system gives rise to conditions that transform thought into those very scenarios of action they seek to obliterate. Zionism, always distinct from Judaism, erupts as a cold-blooded passion in media society and worsens the crisis of thinking. The question of knowledge is no longer about access but rather the production of objective data. For Shomo, the endless relativisation of truth is an attack on thought and freedom alike.
‘Why write about thinking?’, someone in the audience asked. Despite admitting to writing this book with trembling hands, Shomo evoked his commitment to the principle of public reasoning. Even at the last instant, the capacity to reason and think persists in Gaza. For thinking is never just about contemplation or theory, nor is it driven by policy. The ‘worst’ is a supposition that aims to silence all thought in the name of keeping the peace; such a silence inflicts a kind of collaborative violence. The collective act of thinking then becomes an act of intervention, resistance and solidarity.
As the sky darkened and the chirping birds and squirrels fell silent and a waning moon rose, it dawned on everyone that the question of independence has no easy answers. Like the paradox of compassionate genocide, freedom and independence contradict each other now more than ever. Gaza is a reality that shatters the rut of compliance. In its shattering it unveils the mirage of false nobility prescribed by the capitalist network of states. One thing is clear: Independence is granted to and by states, not people. Words of hope, subtle and tactile, reveal themselves as if through a haze of smoke. The evening was one such spark of hope. An audience member, Samar from Palestine and student at JNU, registered his rage at the participative silence world over, a silence louder than bombs. In response and in resistance to this silence, Shomo offered that all he could do was write his book every day in his head, even if formally what was signed, sealed and delivered was this one physical book—that opened this possibility of a gathering. The conversation ended on a note of solidarity. Invoking the words of a South African journalist when South Africa took Israel to court under international law, Shomo quoted Marx: ‘Solidarity is a life-giving principle.’
Godard contemplated his distance from Vietnam as he sat before the camera-eye. This was a universal distance, oblivious to his localisation. It made it possible for him to express his desire to visit Vietnam, his faraway and elusive subject. In the end, he was grateful that he couldn’t. Godard let Vietnam invade him instead. In our case, Israel and its allies are a conglomerate of states which strives to deprive people their peoplehood by destroying the world of Palestine. As destructive forces operate unhindered in India after seventy-seven years of independence, our distance from Gaza brings us closer still in thought. Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza is an exercise in thinking against statist injunctions to do otherwise. As long as even the last trace of thought survives, so will Gaza.
Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza is now available on the Navayana website, and at bookstores and online outlets. Read it today.
Watch this video excerpt from the discussion, about the process of writing the book: