Putting It All Together
Oct. 19th, 2005 02:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ziasudraI'm inconsistent in posting these. But here's my reading response for this week, featuring Susan Slyomovics (and the Moroccans) and Talal Asad.
It's 2:30 in the morning and I just finished this. So if it doesn't make sense and it's overall incoherent... ^_^;;
Moroccans As Grounded Human Rights Advocates
Talal Asad’s article drills into us the point that human rights cannot successfully exist outside of a nation-state structure. He mentions the paradox: “The notion that inalienable rights define the human does not depend on the nation-state because the former relates to a state of nature, whereas the concept of citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that Enlightenment theorists called political society.” (p. 129)
While human beings may have natural rights, they are not acknowledged or fully affirmed until grounded within a sovereign state in which space is given to exercise these rights (and to have them taken away as forms of punishment), and where protection of the human is, ideally, also offered by the state.
The irony of the human rights discourse is that as much as it seeks to harp on the limitation and imperfection of the state construct, outside of a nation-state context, individuals do not have rights—the human rights discourse is not a substitute that magically provides stateless people with rights. At least in the world that we live in, endorsement by a certain nation-state structure is needed to define a “human” with “rights.”
(I feel like I say this every week…) Again, we go back to Agamben and the notion of homo sacer. The bare life outside of the political structure is dispensable, unprotected, and needs not be accounted for (the person who kills the homo sacer will not be held accountable). This is why Somali civilians killed as a result of U.S. bombardment aren’t victims, but merely collateral damages.
I’m reminded of our class discussion a few weeks ago about the effectiveness of humanitarian and human rights agencies, especially those “neutral” ones that seek to function outside of a political context. Do they work? Unless some sort of a nation-state-backed protection can be conferred onto them, Asad’s answer seems to be no. This is a shortcoming of the human rights discourse.
In this, I am especially struck by the Moroccans in Susan Slyomovics’ book—people who chose (given their forced circumstances) to find voice in the prison narrative. In the introduction of the book, Slyomovics draws on Forché’s idea that the “social” literary space of Morrocan prisoners is unique specifically to those who have undergone the ordeal: “For Kanafani, a seminal influence on this group of Moroccan authors, the personal, the political, and Forché's sense of the ‘social’ space are inseparable from precise questions of geographical location and historical time.” (p. 4)
There is no substitute for prison narrative. An expatriate writing from the safety of his/her overseas home is never going to have the same spatial and historical identification as someone writing a torture account from the bowels of prison.
To me, the resistance that prisoners and their families displayed is truly admirable. In using imprisonment, torture, and name change to erase a person’s voice and identity, the Moroccan prison system is in effect reducing political prisoners to bare life—suspending them in limbo between physical existence and “disappearance.” To preserve a narrative in the midst of this suppression was difficult, but essential. “Write to exist” became a motto for those who seek to hold onto their selfhood in the midst of torture and incarceration. Prisoners conveyed hope through composing poetry, imagining the outside world onto the bare “screen” of the prison ceiling, and for women prisoners, to use body writing to reconstruct what social interaction was deprived from them. Outside the prison, families used silence as a resistance: refusal to disclose information was not passive silence, but a commitment to protect the family, at the resister’s own risk (p. 157).
It is true that with the succession of Muhammad VI as king of Morocco after Hassan II, human rights violations eased up, more or less, when compared to the late king’s reign. Yet we cannot discount the importance of resistance by Moroccans themselves—many of whom former prisoners and victims of torture—in affecting change in the legal system. The sections about the mock trial and the indemnity payment show that active resistance led to something.
The Moroccans were working for human rights as people within a nation-state construct (despite the fact that this nation-state is what they’re working so vehemently to transform). They did what expatriates and people outside of the state structure could not. If we tie this in back to Talal Asad’s assertion that the human rights discourse is effective only when bound to a nation-state, then the Moroccans did just that—seeking change within the system.
I find it unfair to comment on whether their efforts were “successful” compared to the “progress” of professional human rights agencies who seek to work outside of a nation-state construct. I am so far removed from both to pass judgment. Let me just end by reiterating that I find the Moroccan prisoners’ resistance admirable.
It's 2:30 in the morning and I just finished this. So if it doesn't make sense and it's overall incoherent... ^_^;;
Moroccans As Grounded Human Rights Advocates
Talal Asad’s article drills into us the point that human rights cannot successfully exist outside of a nation-state structure. He mentions the paradox: “The notion that inalienable rights define the human does not depend on the nation-state because the former relates to a state of nature, whereas the concept of citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that Enlightenment theorists called political society.” (p. 129)
While human beings may have natural rights, they are not acknowledged or fully affirmed until grounded within a sovereign state in which space is given to exercise these rights (and to have them taken away as forms of punishment), and where protection of the human is, ideally, also offered by the state.
The irony of the human rights discourse is that as much as it seeks to harp on the limitation and imperfection of the state construct, outside of a nation-state context, individuals do not have rights—the human rights discourse is not a substitute that magically provides stateless people with rights. At least in the world that we live in, endorsement by a certain nation-state structure is needed to define a “human” with “rights.”
(I feel like I say this every week…) Again, we go back to Agamben and the notion of homo sacer. The bare life outside of the political structure is dispensable, unprotected, and needs not be accounted for (the person who kills the homo sacer will not be held accountable). This is why Somali civilians killed as a result of U.S. bombardment aren’t victims, but merely collateral damages.
I’m reminded of our class discussion a few weeks ago about the effectiveness of humanitarian and human rights agencies, especially those “neutral” ones that seek to function outside of a political context. Do they work? Unless some sort of a nation-state-backed protection can be conferred onto them, Asad’s answer seems to be no. This is a shortcoming of the human rights discourse.
In this, I am especially struck by the Moroccans in Susan Slyomovics’ book—people who chose (given their forced circumstances) to find voice in the prison narrative. In the introduction of the book, Slyomovics draws on Forché’s idea that the “social” literary space of Morrocan prisoners is unique specifically to those who have undergone the ordeal: “For Kanafani, a seminal influence on this group of Moroccan authors, the personal, the political, and Forché's sense of the ‘social’ space are inseparable from precise questions of geographical location and historical time.” (p. 4)
There is no substitute for prison narrative. An expatriate writing from the safety of his/her overseas home is never going to have the same spatial and historical identification as someone writing a torture account from the bowels of prison.
To me, the resistance that prisoners and their families displayed is truly admirable. In using imprisonment, torture, and name change to erase a person’s voice and identity, the Moroccan prison system is in effect reducing political prisoners to bare life—suspending them in limbo between physical existence and “disappearance.” To preserve a narrative in the midst of this suppression was difficult, but essential. “Write to exist” became a motto for those who seek to hold onto their selfhood in the midst of torture and incarceration. Prisoners conveyed hope through composing poetry, imagining the outside world onto the bare “screen” of the prison ceiling, and for women prisoners, to use body writing to reconstruct what social interaction was deprived from them. Outside the prison, families used silence as a resistance: refusal to disclose information was not passive silence, but a commitment to protect the family, at the resister’s own risk (p. 157).
It is true that with the succession of Muhammad VI as king of Morocco after Hassan II, human rights violations eased up, more or less, when compared to the late king’s reign. Yet we cannot discount the importance of resistance by Moroccans themselves—many of whom former prisoners and victims of torture—in affecting change in the legal system. The sections about the mock trial and the indemnity payment show that active resistance led to something.
The Moroccans were working for human rights as people within a nation-state construct (despite the fact that this nation-state is what they’re working so vehemently to transform). They did what expatriates and people outside of the state structure could not. If we tie this in back to Talal Asad’s assertion that the human rights discourse is effective only when bound to a nation-state, then the Moroccans did just that—seeking change within the system.
I find it unfair to comment on whether their efforts were “successful” compared to the “progress” of professional human rights agencies who seek to work outside of a nation-state construct. I am so far removed from both to pass judgment. Let me just end by reiterating that I find the Moroccan prisoners’ resistance admirable.
