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The Isle Of Polyphemus
By Wole Soyinka

Special to USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston
USAfricaonline.com and NigeriaCentral.com

Nobel laureate for Literature, Professor Soyinka (a Nigerian) visited a decimated Palestine in the first week of April 2002, as a member of the International Parliament of Writers. He examines the issues through an ancient myth and notes: " Several aspects of Homer's tale began to take on sobering parallels."

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The irrationalities of the Israeli government and the United States have been mind-boggling - they would be ludicrous if they were not fraught with such predictable tragic consequences. Their insistence for instance, at the early stages of the recent intifada, that the Palestinians observe at least a week of violence-free moratorium before peace talks could begin, was surely apparent to all beings with a claim to reasoning - except those two world leaders - as a demand of unbelievable infantilism, long before Sharon recognised and acknowledged its futility. What my brief stay among ordinary Palestinians did was simply to compel me to revisit that, and allied policy statements by the Israeli government, promoted with such galling insensitivity by the United States government.... Numerous were the accounts of women who gave birth at checkpoints because of the inflexible control that was exercised over the movements of ordinary people, of deaths that occurred right within ambulances that were trapped in convoys or at checkpoints.... Was I sufficiently detached during this visit? Of course. And then again, of course not. It is not possible to take a purely clinical, objective view of the situation in Palestine. When human beings are being blown up in restaurants, in hotels, and especially with a singularly grotesque sense of timing - while sitting down to a holy feast, such as the Passover - one experiences both rage and horror at the perpetrators.

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It was a startling image, unexpected and unsolicited. It offered itself as an irresistible metaphor that Monday afternoon, the first full day of my visit to Ramallah with a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers, at the checkpoint where the road had been cut. Dwellers of and visitors to the city had to disembark from their vehicles, cross the checkpoint on foot, and take up different transportation on the other side of the guttered road: a raucous, potentially explosive junction where traders had set up an instant market, mostly in fruit, snacks and refreshing drinks.

A young man in a bizarre, colourful outfit, with a makeshift bandolier in which plastic cups were tucked, having noticed my curiosity, offered me a drink. I had not changed any money, so I could not afford one, and explained this to him. This did not bother him in the least. He had decided that I should have a drink, and he doled it out, free of charge.

But this was not the image that summed up the Israeli-Palestinian visit for me; this was the benign face of our experience - an eager, warm and hospitable embrace, a need to connect with outside humanity and be reassured that the world had not forgotten this terrain of deadly attrition.

The crucial image offered itself on our way back from Bir Zeit University. On leaving Ramallah, we did what everyone else did - disembark from buses at the checkpoint. It had been deserted by Israeli soldiers, as it had become a focal point for attacks. We negotiated the concrete blocks, crossed the deep gutter that had been cut across the tarmac, and entered taxis organised by our hosts. On our return, it was the same routine: taxis from the university campus, cross the checkpoint with a human motley - workers, students, professors, peasants, doctors, nurses, school pupils - then walk to the rowdy, improvised motor park to await the buses that had dropped us off in the first place. It was then that the telling image unfolded.

A truck arrived at the motor park, but instead of human beings or goods, out came a flock of sheep, prodded by their keeper. We watched as the shepherd began to herd his flock down the stone and scrub valley that sheared off just where the road executed a deep armpit curve. Was this a short cut across to his destination, a country track to another town or village, or did he merely wish to let his sheep graze a little before loading them into a new vehicle on the other side? We did not remain long enough to find out.

What did happen, however, was that I had an instant flash: Ulysses trapped in the cave of the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus. Several aspects of Homer's tale began to take on sobering parallels. Ulysses had sought shelter for himself and his men in the cave of the giant Polyphemus but the host proceeded to dine serially off his guests, sealing them in with the aid of a huge boulder.

While Polyphemus was asleep, Ulysses made his bid for freedom by driving a sharpened and heated log into the single eye of their captor. With his usual guile, Ulysses had not given his real name to his host but had introduced himself as No-Man. When the fiery stake sizzled in the giant's eye in the dead of night and he bellowed out his pain, his fellow Cyclopes ran to his aid, demanding who or what had caused his anguish. "No-Man is the villain," replied Polyphemus. His neighbours, disgusted, advised him to seek a cure for his nightmares and retreated to their own caves. "If no man is tormenting you," they cursed, "why do you disturb our sleep?"

When dawn came, Ulysses and his rovers remained sealed within the cave, waiting for Polyphemus to roll aside the rock, which he was obliged to do in order to let his sheep out to graze. But the pain-crazed giant had opened the cave just wide enough for the sheep to exit singly, sweeping his vast hands over each sheep to ensure that no one was riding on its back. Wily Ulysses had, of course, tied his men under the belly of each animal.

Once seaborne, Ulysses could not resist taunting his foe, screaming abuse at the giant. In thwarted fury, Polyphemus flung huge lumps of rock in the direction of the needling voice, setting off a virtual tsunami that nearly swamped his tormentors. Too late.

Ulysses, had he so chosen, could have returned and stung the blinded Polyphemus again and again. And Polyphemus would have uprooted all the rocks - a prominent feature of the Palestinian terrain, dazzling white - and flung them blindly in the direction of his assailant, missing him completely but provoking one deluge after another that would threaten to inundate the world and drown all its innocent inhabitants.

The facelessness of No-Man - so many of them, of all ages and both sexes - is what enrages the government of Israel, and its leader, for whom the evocation of the figure of Polyphemus could not be more apt. In the process of exacting vengeance on its enemy, it has adopted tactics that will either set off a tsunami to drown the world or, more aptly, set it on fire.

Unable to identify and strike pre-emptively at its elusive enemy, but determined to identify a target, focus the attention of the world on that target, and place a name and a face on the slippery body of Satan, Ariel Sharon has chosen to obsess himself with the convenient and reductionist identity of Yasser Arafat. Failure is being dressed up as reason and frustration as factual knowledge. "We know who our tormentor is," shouts Sharon, echoed by the government of the US, "and it is Yasser Arafat."

Long before I ventured near the cave of Polyphemus, it had astonished me that anyone with the slightest intelligence could imagine that, within the context of the Middle East conflict, any one individual, no matter how highly respected by his followers, how sacrosanct his authority, could control a form of action that stemmed out of both collective and individual desperation and trauma. Yasser Arafat is, of course, simply not in control of the many arms of the Palestinian resistance. None of the various groups can boast absolute control over individual acts of determination and resourcefulness. Timothy McVeigh took more than 200 souls down in one fell swoop. No one has attempted to heap on the president of the gun lobby the sole responsibility for McVeigh's homicidal resolve to avenge the victims of Waco.

Nor indeed - as I pointed out on a number of occasions during our visit - did anyone hold the prime minister of Israel responsible for the action, many years ago, of the military reservist, a medical doctor, who opened fire on a congregation of Muslim worshippers in a mosque, killing a score or more of Muslims before turning the gun on himself. The irrationalities of the Israeli government and the United States have been mind-boggling; they would be ludicrous if they were not fraught with such predictably tragic consequences.

Their insistence, for instance, at the early stages of the recent intifada, that the Palestinians observe at least a week's moratorium on violence before peace talks could begin, was surely apparent to all with a claim to reasoning as a demand of unbelievable infantilism - long before Sharon recognised its futility. My brief stay among ordinary Palestinians drove me to reconsider that demand, and the allied policy statements by the Israeli government, promoted with such galling insensitivity by the United States government. If I took anything away from our visit, personally, it was the intensification of my private terror that so much critical interventionism in world affairs rests in the hands of leaders with limitless military power.

Months ago, in an article in Encarta Africana, I wrote that the Israeli government was "tearing out the heart and liver" of Arafat and "feeding it to his children" - and wondered who could fail to predict the consequences of such an evisceration. What I saw last week made me truly afraid for the Israelis - it reinforced my view that many of those who believed that their political leader was treading the right political path had simply never taken the trouble to project their minds into the refugee camps of the Palestinians, into their daily existence - much less visit the physical reality, experience at first hand the daily humiliation and the scars of memory that characterise the condition of nearly all Palestinians today.

We saw the checkpoints through which thousands of Palestinian Arabs pass in order to work at their sole economic source - Israel - and we were trapped in the endless motor convoys in which Palestinians pass daily to and from work. Those convoys reminded me of my own country, Nigeria, between the first military coup and the Biafran civil war, and its immediate aftermath. It recalled the faces of despair and resignation, but also the simmering anger of a populace that faced daily humiliation at the hands of an arrogant military.

The sense of humiliation in Palestine was just as palpable - you could touch it, measure it and weigh it. It found expression in numerous ways - from the ordinary people in the streets, men, women and children, to university lecturers and students, representatives of non-governmental organisations, writers and civil leaders. It was affirmed by foreigners who were compelled to share the lives of the Palestinians, including the staff of the United Nations refugee organisation, UNRWA. There were numerous accounts of women who gave birth at checkpoints because of the inflexible control that was exercised over the movements of ordinary people; of deaths that occurred within ambulances trapped in convoys or at checkpoints. And of course we crunched mortar beneath our feet, picked our way through the rubble of demolished houses and saw the active policy of land encroachment by settlers - demolish, create a no man's land, then move into the space vacated when the Palestinian occupants have been harassed beyond the range of guns.

These instances of dispossession, and their chilling methodology, have been meticulously recorded by UN agencies, foreign embassies and external visitors. The evidence was overwhelming, indisputable.

Was I sufficiently detached during this visit? Of course. And then again, of course not. It is not possible to take a purely clinical, objective view of the situation in Palestine. When human beings are being blown up in restaurants, in hotels, and especially with a singularly grotesque sense of timing - while sitting down to a holy feast, such as the Passover - one experiences both rage and horror at the perpetrators. It is an abuse of the word martyrdom to apply it to the murder of innocents. If there are no innocents in any struggle, then let us give up the cause of humanity.

And then there is the other side of terror, the state variety. If you listen to a family give a graphic account of tanks crashing through their walls at night, bringing down mortar on sleeping members of the household, crushing innocents in their sleep, it is equally impossible to remain viscerally disengaged or to fail to be morally assaulted. These had been homes to innocents for generations. Now they have been turned into the breeding ground for a new species - the dehumanised.

The devastating shockwaves continue. The horrors that have become a daily diet for both sides in this ominous conflict were brought home to me even more drastically on Easter Sunday from the comparative safety of California, where I read about the latest outrage in Tel Aviv. The name of the street rang a bell. The explosion appears to have taken place in a cafe on the same street where I had gone for an "espresso fix" while waiting to meet Shimon Peres, having driven from Gaza early on Wednesday morning. It could have been the very same cafe - I have yet to find out. In the meantime, however, the sharp, yet wistful features of the friendly young girl who served me my coffee leaped instantly to my retina, and remain stubbornly superimposed on it. Has she become yet another statistic of the purblind peevishness of Polyphemus? ·
This report, which will appear in the April 23, 2002 edition of USAfrica The Newspaper, is copyrighted by the IPW : Parlement International des Ecrivains/International. It is part of the eight Parliament writers who recorded their impressions on the trip to Palestine. They include: An Open Letter to General Ariel Sharon, Breyten Breytenbach; The IPW's Journey to Israel/Palestine, Vincenzo Consolo; Some reflections on a journey to the Occupied territories, Russell Banks; and From Netanya to Ramallah, Juan Goytisolo

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