Narrating the city

My land, a woman

Norman Ohler and Ibrahim Farghali, two Goethe Institute "city narrators", tell Rania Gaafar and Youssef Rakha about their respective experiences in Stuttgart and Ramallah -- recounting their journeys of personal and collective discovery

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Ohler with Israeli soldiers in Ramallah

Norman Ohler, 34, is an emerging German voice with three novels to his name ( Die Quotenmaschine, Stadt des Goldes, Mitte ); one of these was the first ever in that language to be published on the Internet. These books, promoted by Ohler's publisher as "a metropolitan trilogy", deal principally with life in the big bad city: New York, Berlin, Johannesburg.

Ohler's four-week writer-in-residence stay in Ramallah as part of the Goethe Institute's Internet-based Midad (Ink) exchange project -- an initiative that has so far provided for six German authors to spend time in six Arab cities, keeping a daily Web log of their observations and thoughts, and vice versa -- must have been a rather unfamiliar experience at some level. (Ohler's diary can be read in German and Arabic at www.goethe.de/midad, and at the author's own web site, www.sayheykey.com ).

Yet online diaries, an increasingly popular medium in these times of global strife and politically controlled media, seem right up the writer's street. They provide not only a means to conveying uncensored information and analysis but a uniquely accessible, fully democratised channel for creative self expression.

Ohler could have found a predecessor in the so called Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, an ordinary Iraqi citizen who on a website named "Where is Raed" kept a daily "blog" of his experiences of the bombardment and takeover of Baghdad. The war over, the British media sought out the person behind this spontaneous, highly valuable record of war, and when Pax was finally found the Guardian promoted his diary entries, eventually published in book form as The Baghdad Blog ; and the BBC hosted Pax on Hard Talk.

And it is precisely the immediacy, voyeurism, anonymity and what the late British dramatist termed "emotional plagiarism" -- the process of appropriating the pain of others with a view to subsuming it into that of the subject -- that invests the Internet-based work of Pax, and Ohler, with appeal as a welcome alternative to the media's largely procedural analysis, whether undertaken through state controlled or alternative channels.

Self-centred, emotional, first-hand accounts of people and places, these blogs are intended for a large, if often necessarily cultured audience whose voyeuristic thirst is increasingly unquenchable. More significantly, perhaps, the audience cherishes the personal becoming political, the process whereby these diaries have developed their own, Internet-specific form of subjectivity.

Digital prose writing would seem to set subjective intimacy free, making it available to an ever greater circle of readers -- a process reflected in Midad -- but perhaps, even more importantly, liberating the creative capacities of writers. The experience certainly seems to have made some such difference for Ohler, the Berlin-based author with whom my appointment at 2pm on Saturday -- at the Suhrkamp publishing house stand on the Frankfurt Book Fair grounds -- turned out to be a confirmation of such thoughts.

This is visitors' day and it is impossible to push through the crowd. It is hot inside the building, and we look for a quiet, cool spot in which to talk. Ohler's friend points to an empty conference hall just one floor underneath, and on our way I inform Ohler of my intention to discuss concepts of love and sensuality under occupation -- all those things that seep through from in between the lines of his sound, multilayered and stimulating diary of life in Ramallah, and which are equally present in a novel serialised a few years ago in Die Zeit,. He nods, laughing, wondering how I managed to find the excerpt in question in the newspaper's archives, requesting that I send it to him in the next few days so he looks at it again with the benefit of hindsight.

At Tamara's, Shortly After Five is the title of the novel in question, an extremely condensed narration that juxtaposes the drives of Tantalos and Eros, expressing a painful, yet always enticing infinity of desire. Such would seem to be Ohler's principal concern as a writer: all-consuming erotic energies that tend to find fulfilment in death and murder -- presented in a fantastical framework if not as real-life experience -- and the impossibility of attaining fulfilment through love.

Tamara, we learn, has a Russian accent and reddish-brown hair that smells of timber. And when the male protagonist, in a sudden bout of desperate passion, asks whether she wants to flee the city, to have children with him, it turns out that she makes a sharp distinction between her actual role as a woman and her possible role as a mother. "A mother is the opposite of a woman," she says. This conversation, like much of the novel, takes place in her messy, dimly lit, alternative-style Berlin apartment; and it takes the reader by surprise: "I don't want anyone to know who I am. I want to stay alone. I don't even want to know myself."

Ohler is tall, charming. He shows up in casual wear, with tousled hair, the so called "Berlin-Mitte hairstyle" -- apparently a trademark of Berlin's new generation of writers and artists. He wears sneakers and a striking golden ring, not a wedding ring. He looks as if he comes originally from Hamburg, being typically northern in both style and appearance, though the German press has commented much too frequently on his provincial Palatinate background and the singular achievement of having made it in Berlin despite his rural upbringing. He has sharp, intelligent eyes that seem to look past the surface of things.

"Palestine has sharpened my sight and opened my heart," he says. "It was a very stimulating experience." This interview will approach Palestine differently, I feel, observing him. It will not be concerned with carnage and dismembered bodies; it is not about a printed literary work that explains and provides a subtext for media images, imitating the authorial function of the television voice-over as it chases after meaning, seeking one word after another, documenting cruelty in a desperate attempt to combat the paralysis of the individual caught within any superimposed system of communication designed to make pain invisible and blunt emotion.

The hyper-reality of Gaza and the West Bank, inflated rhetoric notwithstanding, is empty and painless; beauty goes unnoticed, unfelt. The audience commits itself to emotional expiry dates in order to mediate the horror, free themselves of the guilt. Life goes on. What Ohler's diary shows, on the other hand, is that there is sensual life in Palestine; even Palestinians can be passionate lovers, notwithstanding the fact that such luxurious emotions can only be experienced at intervals, rather in among than beyond the media's staple of images; and they remain the principal driving force behind resisting life under occupation in search of both freedom and justice.

Ohler took along to Ramallah his characteristically "German coldness", he tells me, something he attributes to the two world wars, "two events so brutal they made people lock themselves up psychologically and emotionally". Yet his diary is full of warmth -- heat, at least. And when I ask him about those parts of his diary in which he comments on the beauty of Palestinian women and, with irony, his consequent desire to apply for the post of visiting professor in Ramallah, he speaks of the intensity of experience in Palestine; perception is so intense it breaks German defences.

"There is emotional insensitivity in Germany," he supplies, and I immediately disagree, wanting to replace "insensitivity" with "maturity": a capacity for transparency, Adorno's Mèndigkeit. The emotional surplus Westerners tend to assign to that mythological, "the Orient", is nothing but the immediate perception of a strange culture through exotically trained senses -- indeed of any culture perceived by a stranger.

Yet perhaps there is some truth to the aforementioned intensity, a small kernel of reality that informs Orientalist mythologising; and it is this kernel that Ohler insists on upholding to the end: "The environment and the people were closer in Ramallah than they ever were in Germany. Smells and tastes were all in all less intensely perceived in Germany than they are in Ramallah." No doubt it is the tension of war, the state of sitting before the computer while hearing gunfire outside, that lends credibility to this discourse, which might otherwise be criticised as intellectualised, experientially hollow.

Ohler's diary reflects an eye-opening experience, in the literal sense of the word: "I wanted to write poetry, but I felt the need to document the things I experienced in Palestine. The wall is a crime against humanity, and should be punished by sanctions. It is one of the worst things happening on earth at present -- a wall constructed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is why it appears as an act of desperation. At the same time it gives hope, because every wall can be brought down again."

If not for such political awareness, perhaps these accounts of "life under occupation" -- Ohler has since been labelled, provocatively, "Intifada tourist" -- would have been less convincing. Even more convincing is the way in which he elaborates on his central themes in a new context -- the occupation forces' desire to penetrate and occupy land, the madness of Israeli discourse and the daily humiliation of Palestinians at check points, their customary slaughter in response to bombings.

At one point he gets drunk, sitting in a swing in a friend's garden -- a setting that evokes the Romantics' "spontaneous overflow of language". He marvels at the possibility of fulfilling desire that originates in romantic attachments, but abandons this idea in favour of "desiring desire", the circulation of love's covetous phantoms through daily life despite -- or because of -- the occupation: a love never to be fulfilled. "Sometimes I look into someone's eyes and we tell each other of the possibilities we will never realise."

Ohler's concept of unfulfilled love is derived from Goethe's Werther, he explains. But his notions of desire are rather more politicised. It is desire, he goes on, that lies at the heart of the occupation -- the germ that drives the body of the conflict. "It is a sexually burdened conflict and it's quite unbelievable that a population of six million should manage to oppress one of four million. There is no rational explanation for this, it's rather about sexual drives and fears," Ohler insists.

Which language does he find appropriate for life under occupation, though? Can language really be an instrument of subversion? A young Palestinian poetess he interviewed, he reports, an admirer of Mahmoud Darwish, said that, after reading the poetry of the latter, she could look at the world through his eyes. Ohler met Mahmoud Darwish in Ramallah on more than one occasion, an experience he found enriching in itself.

"Darwish embodies the valuable spirit of Palestine. He is someone who changes every day -- witty, intelligent, a poetic genius, but not an eccentric. People rather identify with him," Ohler says enthusiastically. "His influence on Palestinian society is enormous."

More generally, rather, to answer the question, Ohler describes poetry under occupation -- more generally, in colonial times -- as a powerful, single-minded force, with none of the complications, the messiness, of prose. He accepts the canonical distinction between prose and poetry ( nazm and nathr ), which dates back to the eighth century. At that time, he says, the art of poetry was perceived as superior, since prose, whether narrative or descriptive, was perceived as rather more messy, less directed.

In Ohler's diary entries, movement is transformed into enforced paralysis -- utter humiliation: "The enormous extent of the occupation became clear to me in Palestine, and the extent of its being a crime in itself, how far reaching the effects are for millions of people."

Ohler was denied permission to enter Gaza, and he describes the Erez checkpoint as a mixture of East German (DDR) high security wing and airport passport control: investigations, mirrors, baggage searches, hour-long queuing up -- and then he does not even make it to Nablus, that beautiful small town flanked by two mountains, because some overzealous teenage soldiers have decided it might not be a very good idea.

Standing there at the checkpoint, Ohler witnesses an existential as well as psychological horror. Palestinians are forced to hold their identity cards up in the air while continuously being screamed at, he writes. Natives of Nablus prevented from entering their home town: they are shouted at, brutalised. It is unequivocally "contemptuous of humanity to see sadist soldiers scream at Palestinians while settlers watch them, crossing the check points, without the slightest problem".

Another time, while driving along in a car that carries an Israeli number plate, he stops to pick up a very old Palestinian man who was seeking to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem. The man is frightened by the number plate, but Ohler tries to explain to him, in broken Arabic, that he wants to help him reach his destination. At the next checkpoint the old Palestinian is stopped, however -- forbidden from entering Jerusalem. Ohler will not leave without him, the Palestinian knows of a secret route, and together they push forward, eventually arriving at the next checkpoint, passing without further ado, but only coincidentally. Yet there are tears in the old man's eyes as Ohler drops him off at Damascus Gate.

In his diary Ohler endeavours to supply a cross-section of Palestinian society, weaving poetic passages into the fabric of documentary observations in an attempt to transmit the small pleasures of life, the overarching madness notwithstanding. The process is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon's ability to bring up pleasurable banalities in the midst of horrific circumstances -- a vital necessity -- when he asks the Algerian Commandant Azzedine, a victim of torture by the French, when it was that he last had sex.

Ohler, a graduate of Hamburg's prestigious School of Journalism, has been working as a journalist for a range of newspapers and magazines from Der Spiegel and Stern to Geo and Die Zeit. And it is the interview format that helps him get by in Ramallah. He devises a set of questions for his interviewees, which, one way or another, reflect the twists and turns of life under occupation: long chains of traumatic incidents interspersed by normality in parenthesis, as it were. What are your plans for the weekend? Your dreams? Your favourite dish? Why does Israel build the wall? How do you manage to live under occupation?

At times Ohler recalls Genet in 1982, declaring that Palestinian resistance lacks imagination: "Why not try to walk to Kalandia checkpoint en masse, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Still, I understand the possibility that Israeli soldiers would shoot, risking a massacre. But the world media would be present. It is a conflict that requires far more attention, and Middle East media reports are biased. I knew that behind the wall there were people who want their freedom. A democracy has to protect its minorities, or as Willy Brandt would have said, a democracy must be an act of daring, and this is not the case at all in Israel... One has to confront the guilt of all that is inflicted on Palestinians, teach school children about the reality of Palestine, the year 1948. Not repress reality."

Al-yawm khamr wa ghadan amr (Today is drink, tomorrow the command [to duty]), writes Norman Ohler. He could have quoted Janis Joplin as well: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." Such terms would make Palestinians the most liberated people on earth.