Rasha Salti – “I am so lonely: Palestine as a metaphor”

I am so lonely: Palestine as a metaphor as imagined by Rasha Salti, One of fifteen islands fabricated by Greg Sholette based on ideas proposed by invited collaborators, Mixed media (paper, sand, plastic, wire, resin), 2012

My Dear Greg,

I have kept you waiting… I needed time to find my words and figure out how best to communicate notions, sensations, emotions, that might inspire a sculpture, or a sculptural object. I am not sure I have found the words I was looking for, or if what I am proposing will inspire you… It was not only a matter of “finding the right words” for a “descriptive” text from which, or in which, a representation (or object) can claim root, but also to make sense and organize in some order the many, many subjective associations to the city compiled over years. Somehow, two strong motifs prevailed over this complicated “interior” construction of the city I seem to have built over time. They are culled from my experience of living there. And in true New York grit, or like a stranger sitting next to you on the subway, I will lay them out in anecdotes.

The first motif is: “I am so lonely.”

It is only after I moved out of New York, and returned for a single long-ish visit once every year, that I have come to realize how deep the imprint of the city on my sentimental self. New York ruined me for other major cities. Most of what I love most about it is long gone by now -that is the rule of big cities, I know- but I love going back to the traces, no matter how intangible or quirky, noting year after year the changes over time. I can still recall when I realized I had helplessly fallen in love with the city, and that it would take a long time for me to love like this again. I was walking home on 13th street in the middle of the day to avoid- pedestrian- traffic on 14th street, as I passed by the back wall of a post-office and noticed for the first time a graffiti that read: “I am so lonely.”

I could not think of any other city in the world where loneliness is so pervasive and common. You ride the bus, it’s a bus full of lonely people, take the N, R or J subway, and the train’s cars rattle in the underbelly of the city, transporting lonely people across town with you in the middle of them. Unlike other cities, being lonely in New York is no one’s fault, it’s just the fate of those living in the city. You resign yourself; and your loneliness finds a strange, mute, warmth in the company of a fellow New Yorker’s loneliness.

The second motif is: “Palestine as a metaphor.”

My experience of New York is essentially mediated through my being Palestinian (are you smiling wickedly?). You can only imagine how, invariably, any situation, conversation, disposition and speech, became “interesting.” For some time, I wondered what the equivalent American “idiom” might be. Mahmoud Darwish, one of Palestine’s (and the Arab world’s) most influential, eloquent and accomplished poets, imagined a conversation with a Native American “at the hour when he looked at the sun,” or after Columbus landed in North America and deployed might, conquest and genocide. Right was lost, for good? There is our “shared” history with Native Americans, that fateful year, 1492. Our Granada was vanquished -Arabs, Muslims and Jews- were expelled from the south of Spain. Both conquests were consecrations of how the “West” would define its righteousness and write itself in history. The New as well as the Old Worlds.

I have always felt an uneasiness when visiting or looking at Ellis Island, I imagined a Native American standing next to the stone-cold, neo-classically uninspired French woman carrying a torch as she claims: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” From his perspective, and “where I come from,” the woman’s summon resonates with Golda Meir’s notorious, “A land without a people for a people without a land.”

“Palestine as a metaphor” proposes to see Palestine as a mirror of the world: the subject of a historic miscarriage of justice and the dignified struggle for reversing that injustice; to see the world from the purview of the vanquished, the expelled, the silenced, the un-namable and unrepresentable. “Give me your tired, your poor…” History cannot redeem lost geographies, and to cite Darwish: “language and metaphor [a]re not enough to give a place its full sense of ‘placeness.’”

An island of lonely people; a metaphor; redskins and terrorists; land, right and dignity.

-Rasha

Rasha Salti is an independent film and visual arts curator and writer, working and living in Beirut, Lebanon.

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