Joudah & Oliver
Fady Joudah’s short piece Mimesis motivates a series of repeated allegorical readings of power and place, where an ending asks the reader to revisit the previous lines of the poem, looping back upon itself and reassessing them through a different lens. The concluding line ‘She said that’s how others, Become refugees isn’t it?’ changes the context from an innocent set of recollections about the author’s daughter and the spider which sets up home in the handles of her bicycle, to one of asking about the nature of exile and asylum. We know that the daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider, but the daughter still waits for it to leave of its own accord and contemplates tearing down the web after a time. In a simplified allegorical reading, the daughter is the state, moving refugees (here played by the spider) from place to place, either through patience or by force.
But Joudah is asking the reader something more complicated, more material. Joudah is himself Palestinian, and knows all too well what it feels like to have one’s web torn down in the face of the kinds of regional conflict which have dominated the headlines for decades. Read through an autobiographical lens, the creation of refugees becomes intergenerational, passed down from father to daughter as the wars between settlements in the Middle East go unresolved. Who Joudah describes as refugees goes far beyond the allegory of the spiders, and might be read as a number of peoples, in the most recent and violent cases, his own Palestinian people moving south through Gaza. Joudah, now as an American emigrant living in Texas but who has volunteered with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders is viscerally familiar with the human cost of such displacement. These are refugees faced with the choice of waiting to be moved on, or moved on through the force of military violence. Moral hierarchy and authority, just as in the real world examples, are ambiguous, highly politicized and globally contentious. Where the refugees go next is often itself a source of populist dispute. Joudah highlights the extreme temporality of such ‘nested’ populations, and asks us as the reader to draw upon a closer examination of power and ownership of place.
If Joudah’s refugee spiders have been moved on through force, Oliver’s trümmerfrauen are the women who remain and clean up what’s left. The Austrian and German women who rebuilt their cities after the destruction of the Second World War. Tasked with restoring the order of the bombed cities, they sift through the pain of the rubble, seeking to turn ‘chaos into harmony’ under the reconstruction of a defeated culture. They work in silence where they ‘select each brick and tend to its imperfections; as she cleans it, she also cleanses her memories’. The act of reordering the city’s rubble becomes cathartic ritual for the cleansing of the conflict’s violence, and the restoration of a nation’s soul. If we clean, if we wipe away, we can travel back in time to a place before it happened. A place which only lives in our memory but can be visited through bringing order to world. A place in both Joudah and Oliver where we can be more than the nameless, faceless spiders or workers. A place where we might live without the fear of being moved on or forced to flee from airborne violence. A place where no matter who you are, there is never a need to clean up the mess.
We might describe our reading of Joudah as a prompt. Asking us to consider the guilty, the indifferent, the violent, powerful or responsible. Tracing the aspects of patience, violence and guilt as affective experiences, we feel these acutely in the following passages:
Indifference: She waited, Until it left of its own accord
Violence: If you tear down the web I said, It will simply know this isn’t a place to call home
Guilt: She said that’s how others, Become refugees isn’t it?
If we read each of these descriptive attributes as allegory for real-world issues, we might see that Joudah is exploring conflict and inter-state violence long before framing the last line about refugees. Waiting until the spider leaves of its own accord echoes much of the politicized indifference expressed towards those displaced by conflict. The populist and nationalist rhetoric that they will simply exhaust their own resources and move along to the next place, and if we just wait it out the problem will take care of itself. Similarly, if the patience of such indifference runs out, the resorting to violence becomes a viable option, where peoples are forced to leave because their homes are have been destroyed. But Joudah’s daughter leaves us with the ethical question about the creation of such displaced peoples. Who is culpable here? And at what cost do we tear down the web?
In the context of my own writing, what’s inspiring here is how much Joudah is saying in such a short space. I’ve written several allegorical pieces, but the real power of Joudah’s piece is how sparse it is. If we apply Freitag’s narrative triangle to the work, we can see just how pared down it really is. There is a simple set of establishing lines introducing the daughter, the bicycle and the spider. The rising action of waiting for the spider to move on. The conflict and violence of tearing down the web. And the falling action of the spider’s realization followed by the ambiguity of a resolution which ends on a question. Joudah’s piece leaves very little space between Freitag’s elements, but invites multiple readings because of its length and the nature of its ending. An ostinato which repeats the musical rhythm of the reader and asks them to play the piece in an endless loop, sadly echoing the real-world loop of inter-generational violence.
I always enjoy fictional works which change upon repeat viewing, where the reader is always asked to find something new, or read it differently. Many of my favorite works of fiction operate like this, for example the way one might view Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining through a number of competing lenses each time. We might read it as a parable about Native Americans and Manifest Destiny. A psychological thriller about the traces of previous inhabitants left behind in the architecture of grand buildings. A straightforward tale of murderous cabin fever. Perhaps even a tale of Kubrick telling us how he was complicit in the faking of the moon landings. There’s a wonder in stories which become richer the more we engage with them. The stories which only give up their secrets at the human cost of repeated readings. And most magical of all, the ones which reveal something different about ourselves every time.
