Against the wall

Tom Kay and Suad Amiry contribute personal narratives, testimonies to life in the shadow of the Israeli occupation and its myriad of un movable and constantly moving walls. Kay's essay sketches his impressions as a visiting sympathetic outsider as he wanders from one village threatened with extinction to another, listening to hopes, fears, and facts, his stream of consciousness often revealing the strain of assimilat ing and communicating the inhuman. Amiry, the insider, keeps a diary and jots down colloquial thoughts and everyday conversations, capturing the Kafkaesque world of checkpoints and barriers. Both accounts are moving, informative, and painful. Their unpretentious prose uses powerlessness as the communal space where reader, narrator, and narrated meet. It can happen easily, although it is not easy to admit?for those who have read so many of these accounts and perhaps penned a few?that the act of vicari ous witnessing could grow tiresome. Amiry leads her essay with this very recognition, concluding, however: [w]hy not bore others, as punishments, for not lifting a hand about our siege? (82). Amiry is here identifying something crucial and unsettling: namely, that these testimonials function as religious texts, proliferating as mini-gospels, news from the suffering god, at once educational, vocational, and penitential. Indeed, the adjective that best describes the common style and attitude of this testimonial genre is pious. But this piety, named here as such without disparagement despite its ever present potential (a potential already evoked by Amiry) for becoming its own substitute, is not Christian, although it is certainly related to Christianity. If the commitment to human rights shares some attributes of the religious, the most urgent question it must perhaps face is that of its relation to its own exterior: What is

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Insider · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Piety · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Testimonial · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · 1993 · Arab-Israeli conflict · Boundaries · Conflit israélo-arabe · Frontières · Grenzbefestigung · Israel · Israeli West Bank Barrier · Mur entre Israël et la Cisjordanie · Nahostkonflikt · Palästinafrage · politics and government · Social aspects · West Bank