Speakers on “Panel 7: Trauma & Resistance Literatures” will be presenting their work from 3:40–5:15pm in Allard 121.
Scott Bursey (PhD, Florida State U), Fairy Tales from the Afghani Jihad: Martyrdom, Miracles, and Mythology in Jihadi Culture
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 the response from Muslim majority countries was swift. Telethons were organized, wealthy statesmen and business magnates were encouraged to make donations and the Saudi state openly covered the travel costs for anyone bound for Pakistan in hopes of joining the jihad against the Soviets. Within this setting, Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989), the Palestinian freedom fighter and Islamic scholar, attained his PhD in usool-ul-Fiqh from Al-Azhar University while studying in the trenches on the Jordanian border. For Azzam, the Soviet invasion was a catalyst that required an individual response on the part of all Muslims to expel the Communist invader.
To facilitate this, Azzam created the Maktab Khadamāt al-Mujāhidīn al-‘Arab (Afghan Services Bureau) with the help of Osama Bin Laden, his largest financial donor. The goal of Services Bureau on the surface was to attract, train and lead Arab fighters in attacks against the Soviets. In reality, the Services Bureau spent little time fighting and instead, its manpower resources were channeled toward providing humanitarian relief to Afghans, and its donor money on creating a magizene targeted at an Arabic speaking audience (al-Jihad, founded in 1985) focused on attracting donor support, Arab recruits, recounting miraculous events the battlefield, and commemorating martyrs. Within the context of these martyrdom biographies all manner of miraculous events are depicted – Soviet planes fall from the sky by invoking the name of God; Qur’anic recitation was used as a tool to avoid being shot while under fire; seeing dead comrades in your dreams as a way to know they have reached Jannah, and so much more. The goal of this paper is to provide a survey of these martyrdom biographies, the miracles they record and situate them within a wider jihadist cultural cosmology.
Sophie Roth (BA, UBC), The Graphic Narrative as a Form of Revolutionary Documentary Witnessing: Zahra’s Paradise and the Iranian Green Movement
Originally serialized online contemporaneously with the 2009 Green Movement, Amir and Khalil’s graphic narrative, Zahra’s Paradise, powerfully bears witness to the trauma enacted by systemic forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings carried out by the Iranian state. This paper explores the ways in which Zahra’s Paradise documented and actively contributed to the Green Movement, as it engaged in a form of artistic and literary resistance through the process of bearing witness to Iranian state atrocities in both the public and private spheres. Drawing on Andén-Papadopoulos’s understanding of citizen camera-witnesses, this paper argues that Amir and Khalil occupy the unique position of intermediary documentary actors who assist in the construction of the necessary counterpart to a witness: a community of listeners.
While popular revolutionary imagery during the Green Movement was primarily based on visual media captured in public spaces, such as the video of the brutal killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, this paper explores how the comic medium can transcend the physical barriers of the public/private distinction to provide visual testament to forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings/torture. Zahra’s Paradise is thus able to mediate putative binaries, contesting not only the boundaries between public and private, but also past/present, living/dead, and collective/individual. Analyzed as a collaborative piece of radical artistic resistance to the Iranian state, this examination of Zahra’s Paradise demonstrates how the graphic narrative medium provides a unique form of aestheticized political expression that engages with the dynamic visual character of popular protest during the Green Movement.
Magdalen Hamilton (BA, UBC), Rereading Barghouti for the Palestinian Present: De-Allegorization and Re-Humanization in I Saw Ramallah
This paper explores the multiple ways that Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah provides a counternarrative to postcolonial interpretations that seek to allegorize Palestinian literature. Contrary to other prominent writers of the post-Oslo era, Barghouti steadfastly dislocates himself from the politicized “poetry of resistance” that romanticizes and abstracts Palestine. Rather, the writer presents an alternative perspective of critical hope hinging upon the preservation of sensory experience and the tangibility of daily life. Building off of what Bernard has characterized as Barghouti’s “materialist existentialist aesthetic,” I claim that I Saw Ramallah calls for Palestinian liberation through the nation’s ‘desymbolification.’ It is through this ‘de-allegorization’ that Barghouti reasserts his own right to physically and emotionally exist within the homeland, while also seeking to document the land and nation’s ongoing estrangement from itself.
I Saw Ramallah enriches postcolonial studies by rearticulating exile as a perpetual and fluid process that can only be countered through the interrogation of our own ideals, beliefs, and accepted truths. By using Palestinian narrative literature as form of witness and resistance to Israeli Occupation, Barghouti offers a critical voice within postcolonial literary discourse that rejects the binary separation between political and individual narratives, placing the lives of ordinary Palestinians at the heart of national liberation.
İpek Ömercikli (MA, UBC), “These are foreign dead”: Necropolitical Aesthetics and Fantasy in Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise
Excavating the now long-forgotten and much-replicated image of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy photographed dead on a Turkish beach in 2015, Omar El Akkad’s 2021 novel imagines a possible future where the refugee boy may have survived. Relying on an action-packed narrative that is self-referentially using Hollywood tropes, the narrative becomes that of a Western reader’s fantasy, of what is possible for the Western reader to imagine or to consume: a tale of suffering and pain that ends in possible freedom where compassion triumphs over cruelty.
Citing both the reception of the photograph and El Akkad’s book, both of which elicited affective responses such as compassion and anger with no accompanying action or self-realization, this paper will discuss an “affect economy that circulates, multiplies, and invests in death” in terms of the so-called (Syrian) refugee crisis (Clough 9). Incorporating Mbembe’s necropolitics and death worlds at the narrative and meta-narrative level, it will argue that El Akkad complicates and negotiates this necropolitical space of global capitalism and its aesthetics, facilitated by his background as an investigative journalist and a fiction writer, and builds up a Western fantasy of a refugee set free, only to expose this fantasy as unreachable, naive, and almost self-congratulatory. Finally, it will investigate the novel’s sublime aesthetics where myth and political landscape merge to illustrate and problematize a common life and death of humanity, transcending beyond this specific history, geology, and politics.