27 Dec. 2001 - 2 Jan. 2002
Issue No.566
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Dec. 2001 - 2 Jan. 2002 Issue No.566 |
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illustration: Gamil Shafik
Beginning at the end
Quoth the raven, nevermore: year's end, and the pivotal moment of death/rebirth is upon us once more. For a second, we are suspended in a limbo of transformation, lost in the labyrinth. No wonder that, faced with the arbitrary despotism of time, we seek to reassert the autonomy of the human will: things must be different in the new year, we say, and hope, and pray -- even as things stay the same, and the earth cries out, stretched seemingly to breaking point by the armies of restless dead it must take in. Yet we say it again, and must believe -- because time goes on, and so that time can go on: things will be different; everything will change.
It has often seemed, in the past few months, that 2001 came to a close on 11 September. The twin towers could have served as pivots in time as well as space, dividing the landscape irrefutably in the triumphant avowal of their existence, reaching skyward not as a minaret would -- as frail assertions of human longing for the eternal, as the acknowledgement of humanity's irrevocable imperfection, and the awed realisation that it is our destiny always to fall short (and that we continue to strive for that very reason) -- but as the expressions of achievement, of human ability to defy gravity and climb ever higher.
Their collapse has served as a symbol for far too many things since then. Too many have pressed it into the service of competing causes: a cultural essentialism that reduces people's infinite diversity to the lumpen sameness of East or West, Christianity or Islam, Good or Evil; a warning that reform is necessary; a cipher for revenge; a threat of retaliation; the fall of Babel. It is inevitable, therefore, that the articles in the following pages should touch on this seismic event, even when they do not mention it explicitly. For the most part, though, they speak of events smaller in scale, although not necessarily easier to grasp: domestic politics, the death of a friend, the rise and rise of the transnational corporations, the rites and rituals through which human beings attempt to apprehend the world -- to understand and assert control over events that so often seem incomprehensible. And once again, that most unfashionable of thinkers is revealed as quite relevant: for it was Marx who remarked that people make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.
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