Very few moments in the colonial present are as jarring as the one I witnessed at Acoma. The tour guide turned the tourists into the exhibit and laid bare the colonial relationships that shape tourism and viewing. This blog entry is dedicated to the power of ruptures like this, moments when viewing and travel are turned on their head in ways that unmask the workings of power and colonialism. I experienced this sort of dissonance in two ways recently: during a ski trip and during a museum visit.
A group of four friends from New Mexico and I went skiing in Lebanon last week. The Lebanese ski resort Mzaar (formally Faraya), is about 1 hour from Beirut. After traveling North toward Jounieh, we turned up into the mountain, and continued up a steep, icy, winding road for another 40 mintues. At the top of the road sits the resort, a huge, bare mountain with three separate ski areas. The day was extremely foggy and only a small part of the mountain was open to skiing. We were the only ones skiing on the mountain for a long while.
The parking lot was a different story. Hundreds of young men and and women had traveled to the resort for the public space offered by its empty parking lot. Groups of men were dancing debke in the parking lot, with bottles of vodka in hand. Large families, many including women in hijab, walked in the snow or brought sleds for their kids.
After skiing the open terrain for a couple hours, we headed down to the parking lot for a rest. While walking through the parking lot a member of our group, a graduate student and professional photographer, whose name rhymes with "Jakob Schiller," began filming a group of young men who were dancing and drinking. Debke dancing is a collective project, involving a group of people holding hands while executing detailed footwork. As my friend filmed the impromptu performance, one of the dancers approached him and very gently took the camera out of his hands. He pushed my friend into the debke circle and proceeded to film my friend among the group. My friend was a great sport about it and played along and enjoyed the moment. The event underscored something important about the politics of looking and filming (which ironically, is the subject of my friend's research); it turned upside down the relations of viewer and viewed and, in this way, disrupted our position as outsiders and documenters.
The ski resort was fascinating; it was the anti-ski resort. No pretension (except for the skiers). The parking lot was livelier and more crowded than the ski slopes. The photographer became the participant and the crowed became the photographer. Moments like these, that unmask social relations and then turn them into something joyful, are rare indeed.
My friends had come to Lebanon for the conference I organized at AUB. The "Shifting Borders" conference brought together more than 90 presenters from 20 countries. More than 170 people registered for the conference (this was the fourth international conference hosted by CASAR). I very much enjoyed the conference. It's very rare for scholars in the U.S. to interact with scholars form Iran, Algeria, Palestine, etc. And the quality of papers was very high.
One of the more interesting parts of the conference was the day trip that many participants took to the south of Lebanon. This is a region that has been occupied by Israeli's and then decolonized between 1982 and 2006. In addition to visiting the border fence between Lebanon and Israel and a famous Crusader castle, we visited Lebanon's number-one tourist destination, Mleeta, the museum of the resistance. This is a Hezbollah museum located atop the mountain where Hezbollah forces successfully decolonized southern Lebanon. The museum contains scraps of Israeli cluster bombs and tanks, scale models of Hezbollah fighters hiding in the forest, and a small portion of the elaborate tunnels built within the mountain. The museum is a monument to Hezbollah's ability to become the the only militant group to ever defeat Israel. Hezbollah's current leader, Hassan Nasrallah, opens the museum with a short documentary film in which he presents Zionism as a colonial movement occupying Arab cities like Jerusalem and Beirut. The museum also presents Hezbollah as an indigenous Lebanese organization, working on behalf of all of the Lebanese, and not just the Shia or Muslim populations.
The largest exhibition is titled, "the Abyss" and it is a collection of Israeli armament that lies in a pit created by an Israeli bomb. Scattered throughout the Abyss are Hebrew letters, written to Israeli drone aircraft that regularly violate Lebanese airspace. The writing lets the Israeli's know that "we are here." This is nothing less than a big middle finger to Israel, as Mleeta was the one place that Israeli intelligence couldn't find during the 2006 war.
The museum, like the ski-resort, turns upside down the normative process of viewing and seeing. Museums are often spaces in which visitors have power to see "others'" material culture. At Mleeta, however, the museum is a monument to resistance and rebellion, and in this way, it can create discomfort for some viewers. Moreover, Mleeta "collects" artifacts of Israeli violence and in doing so undermines the image of Israeli innocence and victimry that circulates throughout the West.
With the conference over, I turn my attention to the meeting of the Alwaleed Centers directors that will be held at Harvard in a few weeks. This will be my first meeting with a Prince, but also my first meeting with a former President, as Jimmy Carter is scheduled to join the six directors and the Prince for dinner. Information on family will be in the next blog post. . .
