Constellations Series: Business
Constellations is a series of responses to Mosaic’s virtual production of Dalia Taha’s KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA, curated by Fargo Tbakhi. We invited Palestinian artists, writers, and thinkers to contribute pieces which are in conversation with Taha’s play. Some pieces will directly respond to the episodes; some will merely take them as a point of departure. All of them will be thoughtful and beautiful articulations of Palestinian artmaking, thought, and expression. Our hope is that this series can expand on and strengthen Mosaic’s commitment to Palestinian culture-workers, creating a constellation of artistic expression which mirrors and honors the loose, non-linear structure of KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA.
Today, writer, organizer, and editor Rasha Abdulhadi responds to our fourth episode, “Business.” They write about commodification, gendered violences, and the co-opting of revolutionary symbols.
Ahlan wa sahlan—welcome. Thank you for being here.
Close readings and leaps from or into "Business" from Dalia Taha's KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA.
Note: the garment discussed in this document is alternately transliterated as keffiyeh (widely used by outsiders, mostly neutral), kufiya (more accurate to Arabic original, author's preference to describe the non-appropriated version), kheffiyeh (inaccurate, making it more foreign, insertion of the guttural sound is a common error of colonists who speak English as a first language and are anti-arab, anti-palestinian, and anti-muslim), kaffiyeh (used by settler colonial media only, seeming to suggest the word for 'unbeliever'). Anyone who calls it a shemagh is using a general term for veiling borrowed from Turkish Ottoman language and investing in a military frame dating back to British imperial seizure of Palestinian lands; this frame is continued by modern anglophone imperial military adventures in lands rich in natural resources. Real kufiyas are large woven squares of fabric, traditionally made in black and white and worn by men as a head-covering, but currently manufactured in a variety of color combinations and worn by all genders. The kufiya is historically and emotionally significant as a symbol of Palestinian village resistance to British occupation in Mandate Palestine prior to the Nakba. Appropriated keffiyehs tend to be smaller than traditional ones, and either make errors in copying the traditional patterns or substitute herringbone, hounds-tooth, or the symbolic motifs of militarism, settler colonialism, or national flags.
Into every Palestinian life, at least one kufiya must come. Whether it is the garment itself or in the pattern on other clothing, even on pottery, perhaps as evidence that Palestinians existed, the kufiya flags us and our resistance, at times even queerly.
In Dalia Taha's "Business," a young girl from Belgium attempts to buy a keffiyeh from a man in his store. Being from Belgium, she just wants a nice scarf as a gift for someone else--nothing political, mind you, but she does want the real thing, the right version of the symbolic garment of struggle, and has been recommended to seek out this man and this shop. The man, for his part, doesn't want to sell her the keffiyeh. We might even delight in how hard a time he gives her, perhaps playing at understanding less than he does, and saying even less than he's pretending to understand. When he tells her the French and the Belgians are all the same, we might be reminded of the ways European empires and their settler-colonial projects have called us all: Arabs.
But between the lines, the shopkeeper is directing us to consider something deeper than just clueless (and also deeply sinister) imperial cultural appropriation. The keffiyeh he won't sell her and the blue bras he tries to sell her become slippery symbols. No one is buying a keffiyeh/the revolution because of the economic crisis--there are not enough resources to purchase kufiyas/rebellion in the homeland. The goods are local but they come from China. Where does the blame lie for turning rebellion into a symbol a colonist can buy? Whose actions can alter this interaction?
Through this short scene, the threads of conversation crisscross and intersect like a fishing net pattern. Under scrutiny but never openly at stake are identity, origin, appropriation, freedom, colonial aftermath, what to buy, who it's for, and who understands what about revolution, history, and economy. The young woman says she'll stay in the country "until I've had enough of it"--a very colonial threat. We find out that usually means about two weeks. Empire's appetite is easily bored, but it wants what it wants. She insists on buying a keffiyeh.
The promise of a secret factory, the one and only place to get the real kufiyas feels like a farce of authenticity, a nationalist nostalgia, hagiography. If the true rebellion is secret and hidden, then it can never die and never be defeated, and it can always be used to discredit those who make open rebellion, who speak plainly in the street. Sure those are illegitimate if they are so easy to access, n'est ce pas?
In a frame where identities have no transformational consequences and merely signal consumption patterns, the young woman's self-applied labels and those applied to her--Communist, vegan, German, Bulgarian, Belgian--are all factory labels of origin, easily swappable or mistakable, none with material consequences that change action of this encounter, any more than the origin of the keffiyeh she seeks or the blue bras she is being pitched.
The kufiya was at one point considered a masculine garment, though Leila Khaled and many after her have transformed that expectation. The subtext of gendered rebellion is also present as the man tries to sell a young white woman a symbol of gender-based violence in Egypt during the Arab Spring. We might expect this to appeal to her role as a white feminist savior of Arab or Muslim women. The young woman finally interprets the man's insistence as a threat to her own safety, playing out a predictable racism, but refusing to even know about the real threat to women in resistance, the Tahrir square assaults by police and government loyalists. She can't stand violent scenes. "I don't do politics," she says, as she insists on buying a keffiyeh as a gift.
It is at this point that I feel most acutely the absence of Palestinian women, Egyptian women, and all my queer and trans kin who risk brutal gender based violence, stay in your place violence, from many sides when we enter struggles for liberation.
As witnesses to this absurdist scene, as stuffed with meaning at its points of breakage as any Ionesco or Beckett, perhaps closer to Brecht, we are given the opportunity to notice how violence and revolution are both commodified. We can notice the commodification of maps and nations. As the man points out the country is "so small you don't need a map"--a statement that is only true for anyone who knows the place and lives there.
What can become a symbol for resistance: Could a blue bra become one? And what would happen if it did--would it be neutralized and emptied of meaning, or deployed as another excuse for imperial military intervention? To empire, it seems that everything is an excuse for empire to continue, to expand, to intervene, to rule. Can any of these symbols deliver material change in the lives of people struggling for liberation? Can a masculinist revolutionary posture and symbolic language care for women--and queer and trans people of all genders? How can we receive care (and offer it to each other) without becoming objects, either infantilized or commodified, and made into weapons against our own liberation?
I'm left wondering:
Who is this scene making fun of? And why do I feel like it's me, no matter what level of critique I peel away?
How does it implicate us as audiences or readers?
What is the message? Who is the message for?
And. Who. Is. Missing. From this frame?
The Best Little Kufiyah Shop in Texas
Here you can buy palestine. Don't
believe them, the ones who say:
It is gone. It never was,
it will not be, here
palestine is free
for the taking.
You will find
fine glass in green
and blue, which is the embroidery
of grief with red for possibility, and those too
are here for sale. In each and every book,
you may come to know,
so intimately: the injuries,
the stubborn refusals to die or to disappear
that make up each morning's ritual--
of brushing teeth and trying not to cry for gaza
of drinking tea and trying not to choke on the news
of going to work and trying not to talk
about how yarmouk and all of syria are now made kin
of sitting down to write
and wondering how many children yet unborn
will one day trace their lineage through the fences of history
and reminding yourself that they will be
the lucky ones, shining, who lived.
Don't be fooled by houndstooth, by herringbone,
by the ceaseless peace scarves struggling
to make an accord with your wardrobe
in a riot of colors that will not conform to affiliation
with either the calls for a nation or the calls
to prayer on the regional rug of another hagiographic caliphate--
for here, on these cheerfully lit shelves
all the kufiyahs from the last loom in palestine are clean,
and well-folded, and ready to encircle your neck with solidarity,
all the oil pressed cold from nablus is waiting for your dinner party--look!
The bottle is so lovely, you must serve it at the table.
And here now is the tatreez
sewn by women without thobs
and prepared as testament
to your support for the people's cause.
Here you can find soap and lotion and
a hundred lapel pins which are for display only.
Here you can recognize the flag
of a playtoy nation and dress your family in red, in green,
in black revolution that you've been saving
for just this occasion. Don’t ask about who must pay
for the shipping. It’s included, and we can’t hear
over the white noise of the register's transaction, anyway.
Additional Threads:
At the end of each Constellations entry, we’ll ask the responding artist to share Palestinian organizations, artists, or pieces they think we should know. Here are Rasha’s picks.
Abolition Disability Justice statement of solidarity with Palestine, featuring concise historical and structural context
Al Qaws statement on Queer Liberation & Palestine
Eight Stages of White Settler Colonial Denial
"Kufiya Arabiyya" music video from Shadia Mansour.
Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner who cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Their work is anthologized in Unfettered Hexes, Halal if You Hear Me, Stoked Words, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. A fiber artist, poet, and speculative fiction writer and editor, Rasha is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Justice for Muslims Collective, and Alternate ROOTS. Their chapbook is who is owed springtime is available from Neon Hemlock.
https://www.neonhemlock.com/books/who-is-owed-springtime-by-rasha-abdulhadi