The Wisdom of Stubbornness
Abstract
Abstract Abstract: How does it feel when one’s wound is an exhibit for an academic who investigates what is scripted as defeated life practices? How does it feel to deal with texts announcing victorious life practices such as human rights and progress while life is being threatened by the modern technologies of violence? How is it possible to read the texts in any hermeneutic fashion while so many familiar ‘coloured’ bodies are being targeted and slaughtered? These are the questions that haunt me in my academic journey. I will attempt to answer them by exploring how the project of Westernised education (developmental time) is entangled with a deeper understanding of the political that poet Murid al-Barghouti captures in his reflection: ‘[politics] is your memories that you fear to gaze at but you gaze at it despite it all.’ I wonder how much the festering wounds and the prominence of the familiar invoke a different temporality that can be but too aware of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of progress and development. I wonder how that political act of the unwilling gaze at one’s wounds and one’s memory reaffirms a notion of time thought to be over, but is not.
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