DRAFT - SEP 16
‘The Man With The Sandals Of Fire’
On Mahdi Amel Love and Becoming
On the sixth consecutive day of the student movement in Amsterdam, the students dropped a sign from the top level of the Roeterseiland University of Amsterdam campus. The sign quoted Palestinian intellect and writer Bassel Al Araj who said ‘You want to be an intellectual? You must resist otherwise you and your education are useless’. A symbolic gesture from the students, within the belly of the beast, revealed - at the very least through its optics - how far academia, especially concepts like ‘decolonial academia’, are an exaggerated attempt to compensate for something missing. Barnard College, part of Columbia University, just this week joined The Wall with their new faculty guidelines stating that professors are not allowed to post public signs ‘that support a geopolitical view or perspective’.
Bassel Al Araj found his answers to questions that are missing, questions that haven’t yet been prosed. His sense of fearlessness metaphorically projected onto the walls of the university stand as a figurative image reminding us that fear is an existential antagonist and when one breaks out of discursive frameworks that restrict their thinking into what is possible, the interpellative forces that ordinarily "hail" individuals into passive or socially compliant is disrupted. In short, when we decide to inherit a certain truth, everything depends upon what follows what. Al Araj renders this shift of the unpalatable through his popular idea that "The beginning of every revolution is an exit, an exit from the social order that power has enshrined in the name of law, stability, public interest, and the greater good.” This unpalatable truth that Araj carries is a decision - one to inherit a voice who came before. When Araj, an intellect himself practiced this, he inherited the words of a revolutionary man who is known by many names. Abu AJ2A (busy) to his closest, Mahdi Amel to those who engaged with his theoretical praxis and Hilal bin Zaytoun who’s poems, grounded in love, acted as an application to his theory. While this man, who applied and practiced the belief that "the intellectual must be a revolutionary or nothing", was far more multi dimension than we’ll ever fully understand, we was all encompassed under the man Hassan Hadman.
I’m not searching for all the words to explain this institutional dystopia, the intellectual’s role in society or even describe the period of history we’re living through. I'm not searching for complex definitions to understand the present as being one of a tyrannical Wall, there are many free thinkers who have taken on this essential task. I’m looking for nothing more than a shared idea to serve as a landmark, void from palatable vocabulary or means employed by those in control. A landmark that by no means suggests a passiveness, but instead a power in inheriting the voices that become part of us, in our alive and in our becoming. The landmark I’ve found is the life of the revolutionary Lebanese writer Mahdi Amel, who’s countless published and unpublished books and poetry together shaped ‘21st Century Marxism’ free from Eurocentric interpretations, through a methodological revolutionary approach ‘kayfiyyat harakat al-fikr fi i‘tibarihi al-waqi‘ mawdu‘an lahu’. His theories were contingent on the colonial social reality, with the goal of a socialist liberation, which he saw as the liberation of all humanity.
When Bassel al Araj went into hiding because he found his answers at the age of thirty one, he knew his assasination was one of becoming. The same clarity was heard when Mahdi Amel knew his death was one of becoming. After speaking at the funeral of his comrade in arms and words, Hussein Mroué after his assasination in 1987, Evelyn Le Brun, Amel’s life partner and the woman who breathed life into Amel’s work long after he died, recalls the conversation she had with him, “You come home, this April evening, a newspaper in your hand. You hand it to me: "Here is my death sentence!" And you laugh, you laugh, a laugh that is at once feverish, electric, but also full of delight. It is the magazine Al Ahed, Hezbollah's weekly publication. You point to the conclusion of a certain article: "The one who made the speech at the funeral of Hussein Mroué, in Damascus, will soon see his turn come."
In 2017 after six months in hiding, the IOF stormed the hiding location of Bassel Al-Araj, where they found two books amongst a few other possessions. One book was written by Antonio Gramsci and the other was "Naqd al-Fikr al-Yawmi" ("Critique of Everyday Thought") by Mahdi Amel. Although their deaths span fifty years, an inherited idea within a movement has allowed for an almost incidental moment of exchange in the present. Such moments - as no historical ‘outcome’ can ever be - are transcendental and in Spiroz’s words become eternal. “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.” This moment of accumulation, when reciprocal, becomes a plot, hatched by two, in the face of, or defiance of, all the other plots which determine the world. An illuminated truth between two, which arrives only by a way of love, where lies the repressed forms of knowledge when the intellect cannot know.
In a conversation with my mother, she recounts an evening in Beirut. The night itself doesn’t sound like an unfamiliar one, or one that hasn’t been shared before. She starts with the music, as if to recognise that before any material recounts of this night begin, music, distinct from the bodies in the room it takes over, is unfixed in a time and place. The sound in the room acquires the bodies and somehow narrates what they have also inherited. Only from here is it possible to start recounting a night dancing with her uncle, The Man with the Sandals of Fire’, Hassan Hamdan, who wrote his books under the pen name Mahdi Amel and his poems under Hilāl bin Zaytūn.
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