On Vernaculars
How discursive media's reliance on master narratives frames (and delegitimizes) counter narratives...
Call it an occupational hazard, not for the historian, but for those written out of (or against) history. As is often said, “history is written by the winners”. Variations of this expression exist in several different languages and cultures and, while cliché, it holds some painful kernel of truth. How then can history be rendered responsibly, thoughtfully, inclusively? What purpose do such histories serve and how can educators be expected to teach inherently biased interpreters or deliberate misrepresentations of events passed?
This is a particularly troublesome question for teachers across the globe. In fall of 2020 I was teaching a poetics course called Poetry for Healing Territories. It was my second time teaching the course, but my first time teaching entirely remotely. One of our classes early in the semester was a visitation of the German-Jewish poet and Shoah survivor, Paul Celan (1920-1970). His life, while plagued with tragedy and guilt and exile, was also a testament to the power of language, of love, and maybe even forgiveness. Without question, Celan produced some of the most profound and well-regarded modernist poetry of the 20th century and was also a prolific translator. I’ve taught Celan several times and each time I try to bring something new to the discussion table. To this day, I’m still learning new things about his life and legacy, discovering newly translated poems or attempting to translate his work on my own. Whether it be his interactions (or lack thereof) with recanted nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger (chronicled in his poem Todtnauberg), or the complexities of his relationships with poet Ingeborg Bachmann and graphic designer Gisèle Lestrange, always something new to discover and discuss.
For this course, I was hoping to discuss Paul Celan’s feeling for/about Israel as prelude to a later discussion of Mahmoud Darwish and the formation of 20th century Palestinian national identity. Unfortunately, our time had begun to dwindle, and after an expository introduction to Theodor Herzl’s 1896 proto-Zionist pamphlet “Der Judenstaat” we had come to the end of class.
This did not sit well with a handful of students who, by the end of the discussion, had declared me a settler-colonial apologist with no clue. It began with one student typing in the chat (paraphrase) that Israel was a settler-colonial state—and this bothered me. Not because I disagree (I don’t), but because liberal Brown students (which constitute a majority) are taught these terms (“respectability politics” for example) and use them…liberally…to curtail deeper and more nuanced discussions of contentious issues. I replied to the comment (because as the professor of a zoom class you’re expected to read comments while simultaneously lecturing) that it was more complicated than simply saying “settler-colonialism” and this triggered an impassioned response from students who shared an opinion on the topic and needed me and everyone else in the room to know theirs was the only acceptable perspective. End of story.
In my defense I noted that, as a Puerto Rican, I am certainly not a settler-colonial apologist (while also painfully aware that identifying with/in a marginalized group does not, a revolutionary, make). To which the same student, whose spittle I could feel through the screen, shot back that I had weaponized my identity against them. At that point, I just did my best to listen and respond as students shared their thoughts or tried to share their thoughts. That is until one student told me, the professor, that I should just be quiet. Stop talking. I could see the perverse joy in their face as they said this.
I volunteered to stay longer and continue the conversation for students who felt uneasy about the direction we were heading in, but none of the vocal students cared to stay beyond their unique declaration that I had failed their expectations. Those that stayed floored me with their grace, patience, and willingness to engage. And considering what a terrible (and occasionally obnoxious) undergrad I had been, it all felt justified.
In no uncertain terms, the meltdown was my fault. We’d run out of time and I had neither anticipated that students would react the way they did, nor had I given the topic the attention it required. I had, in essence, overestimated their confidence in me and their capacity to deal dispassionately with the subject. I had also naively underestimated how contentious, how much of a quagmire the discussion might become. Israeli occupation of Palestine is a matter of life and death—and whitewashed academic discussions of ongoing crises serve the unfortunate purpose of assuring the privileged that they’ve paid their penance by easing their unsettled consciousness. Such discussions breed indifference. So too do overtly aggressive and accusatory tones breed more aggression, distance, or resentment.
However my failing, it had not been my first encounter with the kind of intellectual entitlement and arrogance of ivy league students reared to believe themselves smarter than most. But never had its expression been so vigorous and disrespectful.
In spring of 2020, Brown ranked 9th among universities in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s free speech ranking. By 2021, it had dropped to #52, with Palestine and Israel cited as “the topic most frequently identified by students as difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on campus.” In 2022, Brown is now ranked #114, “slightly below average” among universities in free speech metrics. Statistically, this may be the result of increasing their survey sample size from approximately 20,000 in 2020 to approximately 37,000 by 2022/23. But really these statistics track with a perceptible change in campus climate. What felt like an open forum in 2015 had become by 2020 a morass of loud opinions or repressed rage. And this is not just happening in universities, but in the broader transmission of discourse. Our communications have become more polarized as terrifying seeds planted after the murder of Trayvon Martin and the election of Donald Trump, sprouted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the ascent of Black Lives Matter ideology, the ubiquity (and ambiguity) of Title IX policy, and the severe diminishment of reproductive rights (by right-leaning SCOTUS overruling Roe v. Wade in 2022).
In response, Brown has scrambled to make itself known as an ally in every possible discussion and doubled down on its push for diversity and inclusion while simultaneously doing nothing much at all. Such institutional and/or corporate efforts to address larger social/systemic failings are often expressed as reparative gestures that only serve to bolster the status quo; i.e. in keeping with best practice we’ll hire faculty from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) to meet our new quota (and keep them employed for as long as is necessary or affordable), hire faculty of color with exceptional credentials on a renewable basis to improve the university’s appeal, enroll students from underprivileged backgrounds to live and learn alongside legacy enrollments and donors, etc.
I learned a lot from that teaching experience, from students adamant that the truth of a dire situation be expressed clearly, and from the wealth of material available on the subject (expressing as wide a variety of opinions as I could find). But one thing hadn’t and hasn’t changed (as I would, in so many words, explain to my students in our next meeting): I will not tolerate disrespect in a classroom and I will not allow difficult discussions to be parsed into convenient terms. Who do these convenient terms serve and why?
ver·nac·u·lar| vərˈnakyələr |
noun
1 (usually the vernacular) the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region: he wrote in the vernacular to reach a larger audience.
• [with adjective or noun modifier] informal the terminology used by people belonging to a specified group or engaging in a specialized activity: gardening vernacular.
adjective
1 (of language) spoken as one's mother tongue; not learned or imposed as a second language.
• (of speech or written works) spoken or written using one's mother tongue: vernacular literature.
origin
early 17th century: from Latin vernaculus ‘domestic, native’ (from verna ‘home-born slave’) + -ar.
Settler-colonialism can be a rather inconvenient term, depending on who you ask or who’s done the asking, and in what context. As is often said “context is key” and that context, with regard to language, is frequently power. Perhaps in some obvious, Foucaultian turn, this is and has always been a conversation about power. For the staunchest defenders of Israel, the idea that Israeli citizens have and continue to settle in land and on property not legally theirs, land already significantly populated by Palestinians, is an anti-semetic lie of the left. The term settler-colonial, as such, chafes against apologist sensibilities by reducing the mechanisms of this movement to a historically destructive form of trespass. But it’s not trespassing if one believes, and believes strongly, that the land is their own to do as they please.
By March 2021, in the semester after my diplomatic failure, the International Federation for Human Rights declared Israel an apartheid state. By May, tensions had risen as a result of unconstitutional Israeli rulings over Palestinian territory, giving rise to violent skirmishes between Israeli military forces and Palestinian freedom fighters—Palestinians suffering in excess. In May of 2022 came the “accidental” murder of noted Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Her death, not only denied by Israeli Defense Forces, had been blamed upon the errant fire of Palestinian freedom fighters.
The IDF was quick to use language and tropes to frame Palestinians as so erratically hellbent that, in their frenzy to kill Israeli peace-keepers, they murdered one of their own. This was a lie almost immediately debunked by Al Jazeera witnesses on the ground and a variety of watchdog groups including Jerusalem-based B’Tselem. But it was a lie from a well-rehearsed script, its violence in just how quickly it was brandished as a flimsy diversionary tactic, one presented as truth.
“According to the data we currently have, there is a significant chance that armed Palestinians, who fired wildly, were the ones who caused the unfortunate death of the journalist.”
—Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (Twitter; May 11, 2022)
The Prime Minister could not even bring himself to type Shireen’s name, instead choosing to further depersonalize her death by referring to her as the journalist.
In the spring semester of 2022 I began teaching a course called Losing Record (about the variety of ways we approach and deal with loss and losing) and had decided I would try to discuss the topic of Israel’s occupation of Palestine again in class, this time (hopefully) better prepared. In the time since my fall 2020 course, it had dawned on me that the best way to invite discussion was by way of framing language—making the distinction between what is colloquial language and what is vernacular.
These are terms often used interchangeably to describe forms of demotic (conversational or unpretentious) speech. But while the colloquial applies specifically to what may be deemed common or conversational speech, the vernacular, at least etymologically, implies language of a politically-othered dimension. From the latin verna, a slave born in the master’s house, the vernacular is a language shackled to and muted by the sovereign language of its master. It is a shadow language, denied the privilege and power of the house, the country, the law, under which it was born. An excellent example of the vernacular in culture, my mother was quick to remind me, is the syncretic practice of Santeria in the Caribbean—a means of preserving Yoruba and other West African religious traditions among slaves under the oppressive gaze and guise of Spanish colonial Catholicism. The term itself has been used at points in history to describe various registers of language and culture. Dante Alighieri’s vernacular Italian, for example, used in contradistinction to the accepted Latin of the Holy Roman Empire. He chose to write in the vulgar language of his people, rather than the dominant language of empire. But the vernacular need not be literal language. It might rather describe language within language (codes) that have been displaced from official record or considered illegitimate, incorrect, uneducated, or politically and legally compromising.
Almost immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, American news media declared the militant action a crime committed against an innocent country. We’ve seen this sort of framing a million times before. In the wake of hurricane Katrina, news media fixating on black survivors as “looters”, while white survivors had “found” supplies or “recovered” goods. The rhetoric of innocence applied to Ukraine was meant to condemn Putin’s actions—while also implying that there are, in fact, countries (not innocent) for which invasion would be justified (Iraq?). Ukraine, according to American news media, is not one of those countries justifiably worth invading—certainly not by the former Soviet Union.
We witness the same in American news media’s portrayal of and discourse surrounding occupied Palestine—which, in the news, would not be referred to as occupied Palestine, but more likely, the Israel-Palestine Conflict or just Israel. American news media is too closely tied to and invested in Israel’s illegal governance of an ever-diminishing Palestinian state.
In order to understand the reality of Palestinians in their country and in the diaspora, it becomes increasingly important to seek out Palestinian sources, the Palestinian authors of their own history, and the artists who document the emotional truth of lived experience. Isabella Hammad’s novel The Parisian; or, Al Barisi is a masterpiece chronicling the life of her great-grandfather. A sprawling buldingsroman that begins as the love story of M. Midhat Kamal in exile, gradually becomes a tale of repatriating to a home that is suddenly in danger of disappearing—a world M. Kamal has never entirely felt a part of, until the threat of losing it becomes his reality. Not only is it a paean to ancestors, family, and the triumph of resilience and resistance—it is also a masterful and melancholic treatment of time. I couldn’t recommend this novel enough. Add to this Farah Nabulsi’s The Present (Al Hadiya, الهدية) an approximately 20 minute film (on Netflix) that tenderly and beautifully captures the grief and terror of living in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. It’s Yusef’s anniversary and he’s decided to buy his wife a present. In order to buy the present he has to pass through an over-crowded Israeli checkpoint. Scenes from the film were shot at an actual checkpoint, giving viewers a genuine impression of what it’s like to live under apartheid. Even the most basic and harmless tasks are policed by the occupying state because the threat of an unsupervised Palestinian could risk innocent lives.
But it was Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel Baddawi that we read together in class. Baddawi is the 1960s-70s coming-of-age story of her father Ahmad and his young life in and out of Baddawi refugee camp, northern Lebanon. Panels are adorned in patterns meant as homage to her grandmother’s embroidery. “…throughout this book, you will see a variety of geometric, floral, and sometimes “pixelated”-looking patterns integrated into the illustrations. These patterns are designs typically used in tratreez, traditional Palestinian embroidery.” Even in the telling of her family’s own story, Abdelrazaq is literally framing the narrative, further contextualizing and making the page a space that is symbolically self-aware of its origins and traditions.
(content warning: panels from Baddawi do not shy away from the violent reality of war).
Abdelrazaq, within the space of two pages and twelve panels, cooly conveys how violence is woven into the mundanity of refugee/Palestinian life without sacrificing elements of narrative drama, the stark black/white, the tratreez framing, the close-up on eyes wide in awe and fear, and that final panel (depicting the provenance of the weapons used) contributing to claustral dread. This representation of violence is drawn and written in a style similar to Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, where tragic death happens as a matter of fact and not exception.
Compare the fly-by in Baddawi above (“why are they flying so low?”) to another scene in the Israeli soap Shtisel. If you haven’t seen Shtisel and generally enjoy slice-of-life dramas (this one entirely in Israeli Hebrew and Yiddish), I’d recommend it. It’s a wonderfully written show that offers viewers a nuanced representation of Haredi life in the Geulah neighborhood of Jerusalem. In season 1, episode 11 of Shtisel, eponymous elementary school principal and patriarch Shulem Shtisel has forbidden the students of his heder from taking the day off to observe the IDF’s aerial show on “Zionist Independence Day”. Many Haredi Jews, even within Israel, remain ideologically opposed to some Zionist aims, namely their use of military force (considered a kind of heresy). Despite Shtisel’s ideological opposition to this show of military might, by episode’s end, as the jets are flying overhead, each of the characters in the episode can’t help but concede to the spectacular power of these low-flying jets. Why? Because however we might protest the corrupting capacity of power, we are not immune to seduction by it and, at the very least, would prefer to have it than not. Whereas, in Baddawi, the jets are the source of deadly and tragic force, the air show in episode 11 of Shtisel presents a destructive force that remains a part of Israeli Defense and not Israeli antagonism, inspiring a kind of awe and gratitude in most of the characters (save one stubborn Yekkish widow) despite the institutional stance against it.
What Baddawi made clear to me (with the inclusion of its glossary) is that there are two histories being told. There is the dominant narrative, the one found on CNN and Fox News and in hardback books and documentaries. The other, if presented at all, is presented as a kind of illegitimate history, a vernacular, evident in the terms used to frame the situation as one of Israeli aggression against Palestine.
Israel -or- Occupied Palestine
The War of Independence -or- Nakba
Six Days War -or- Al-Naksa
Israeli Defense Force -or- Israeli Occupation Force
Free State -or- Apartheid
What semantic choices have you made and why? Was there some implicit fear of judgment? It’s understandable, if so. But when you become aware of the lives at stake, the politics at play, it becomes that much more important for you (for us) to understand the consequences of our casual language for urgent situations.
The precariousness of Palestine’s present condition coincides with the danger of its being written out of history entirely, relegated to a parabolic footnote on the failure of diplomacy. The master narrative, by way of force and finance, conforms to the idea that Israel remains a global safe-haven for Jews, both secular and religious. With its ideological foundation often attributed to Herzl’s visionary plan to escape the arbitrary violence of European pogroms, the state of Israel is indeed a “game-changer” for Jews who, for centuries, were victims of out-group hatred and terror (and remain so). Herzl’s proposition of a Jewish state took as potential sites of landing, Argentina, Uganda, and Palestine. These were territories overseen by the British crown, with whom Herzl and invested backers (the Rothschilds, for example) negotiated for future settlements. But it was Palestine that would become the site of overwhelming settlement, especially after the Shoah, and then saw the violent establishment of Israel in 1948—to become the Jewish state and cement a quasi-western foothold in the Arab world.
Sometimes people conflate the political turmoil of occupied Palestine and Israel with broader discourse on religious conflict. But Herzl’s proposal was not at all grounded in religious/Judaic rhetoric. Ironically Der Judenstaat draws heavily from 19th century German nationalism. It was a strictly political plan that would rely on financial backing, back-channel agreements with first world nation-states, and the institution of a militia.
For those who equate the creation of Israel in 1948 with Biblical rhetoric, I’d like to remind that the Bible is a sacred text. And while several books in the Tanakh document the conquests of the various tribes and kings of Israel and Judah (divided by internecine strife), it is not a book of conquests, and it was not meant to justify your personal or national conquests. It is a document of God’s calling to and through a chosen people.
It’s important to acknowledge that Biblical language has been used, especially by the Evangelical Christian right, to justify atrocities committed by the state of Israel. Just as Islam (and Islamism) have been used to justify acts of Palestinian aggression. But the state of Israel is not a theocracy (and Palestine, while majority Muslim, is not an Islamic state). Modern day Israel is not the reconstitution of promises made to ancient Israel (though one may believe it so). Rather it’s a territory meant for those who consider themselves (or are discernibly) Jewish by ethnicity and would like to make a home among other Jews (practicing or not). Israel is indeed a free and democratic state.
In this sense, Israel is a triumph. But a pyrrhic triumph. Israel has become oddly emblematic of 21st century safe-space ideology, evidence of the militarization that accompanies superimposed political boundaries. Safe space for whom and at what cost preserved? Most Americans, if informed at all about Israel and Palestine, imagine the two-state solution still looks like the 1960 representation above. They remain unaware of the illegal border crossings and settlements that happen daily by Israeli housing and development companies, contractors, and military outposts (often built on false pretext that Palestinians instigate the violence that Israeli forces must deter). This phagocytic consumption of Palestinian land is one among many quiet sources of tension.
If the desire for a safe space for Jews has also been realized by way of force (“All Nation-States are born and found themselves in violence. I believe that truth to be irrecusable.” Jacques Derrida, on Forgiveness), it goes to show that desire for safe space often conflicts with our need to feel unimpeded in the expression of our lived experience—and that full freedom (to be ourselves) is sometimes satisfied only by disallowing contrary or dissenting presences. A similar paradox exists in political verbiage for the right to self-determination v. the right to a free state. As Peter Beinart points to in his incisive essay on the political paradox of Israel’s claim to sovereignty, legal definitions (in this case of “anti-semitism”) are weaponized against critics of Israeli policy.
Regardless of your opinion or personal investment, what should be obvious to you by now in the fall of 2022 is that Israel is in violation of international law and that Palestine is in danger of disappearing.
It is not enough (as Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Eating the Dead/Negus” reminds) to insist on the political abstraction of freedom by parsing our most painful and complex realities in convenient terms, terms to be eventually co-opted by a reparative master narrative. What is conveniently expressed and highly visible is also immediately apprehensible and risks losing its value as a form of counter-insurgency—however necessary it may be in the moment. Despite being disempowered in the social structure, the vernacular offers some form of political agency and linguistic autonomy to those brave enough to hold it, wield it, exist within it. The vernacular is itself a space, both psychic and physical, where the people have gathered and shared and bonded over the most elemental forms of creative cohesion. The power of the vernacular is in the insistence of being with. And while this too is not enough on its own to dismantle the bloody machinations of a hellbent oppressor, it remains the first, and sometimes last, line of defense against hegemony.