The Aesthetics of Occupation

Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

...A myopic, ignorant, Westerner wrote to me and said: "How do I hook a worn out, patriotic old rag? How do I reel in an unwanted, rusted Iraqi tin can? More to the point, how do I manage carnal knowledge of its contents? How can you say you are unwanted? How can you think you have no future?" Why can't people conceive of the personal and the collective as one ? A common destiny, that we carry inside of us, like some collective gene pool. This is not about me, this is about us. And us, as we stand today, have no future. We have been robbed of a vision of a future. That is fact. And if someone can still come up with so much ignorant "philosophical" crap -- then they have understood nothing at all about occupation, mass genocide, torture, rape... loss of reference, loss of trust, loss of meaning...loss of Life in a philosophical sense, since you are all so bent on philosophy. They have not confronted that deep existential abyss of occupation with no end in sight. A hideous occupation with all of its facets and consequences... continua / continued