A columnist’s pause, not a full stop

A newspaper always feels reassured when it hires columnists and gives each a piece of real estate on the op-ed page for it knows that it will not be stuck with them for life, say, like the US Supreme Court is stuck with its judges. In short, that newspaper is confident that columnists in turn know when it is time for them to take their last bow and bid their readers farewell.

That time has come for this columnist, one blessed to have had readers who allowed him to share his views with them, week in, week out, for the last 20 years, in columns stretching from October, 2005, that dealt with the trial of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to recent ones that dealt with America’s seeming transition from democracy to authoritarianism - authoritarianism with a dash of kakistocracy - rule by the worst, that is, by the least suitable or competent.

This along with other subjects in between that dealt with the nasty business of injustice around the world or, conversely, pondered over all that is wondrous in the dialogue of cultures going on in this little global village that we all inhabit together. That’s what columnists do, isn’t it? And, being insecure as we are, we try to take ourselves seriously.

Darn, columnists wallow in being called (don’t laugh) pundits, that Sanskrit term meaning “knowledge owner”, one who offers authoritative opinions on matters of concern to the public, a moniker that we, in a fake display of modesty, disavow but on the sly covet. And heck, why not let yourself be associated, however undeserved that association may be, with the world of punditry?

Numerous columnists writing their last column, as I’m doing here, have over the years mused over how agonising the exercise is. Should they, in it, wax poetic, become reflective, hit a maudlin note? Should they, perhaps, render it, like the finale of a long-running television series, deeply resonant?

I, for one, will resort to none of the above. This adieu column is driven by my need to take a long - not a permanent - hiatus from political commentary in order to focus on writing a new book, my fifth.

You see, the catastrophic suffering that Palestinians who live in the occupied territories have endured, particularly since the outbreak of the Gaza war, is indivisible from my identity as a diaspora Palestinian. And it has preyed on my soul precisely because I am a diaspora Palestinian - that is, because, while that suffering was being endured, I was fed beyond my need and I slept safe in my bed beyond the reach of the 2,000-pound concussion bombs dropped by Israeli fighter pilots from their air conditioned cockpits on helpless Gazans.

Friends have asked if I had a therapist who might have helped me deal, if not altogether resolve the crushing feeling of despair that I felt - felt along with other diaspora Palestinians like myself. This instantly reminded me of Ernest Hemingway, who was once asked by his friends, when he was going through an existentially distressing time in his life - to be sure, there was never a time when this winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature was not experiencing some kind of existential stress in his troubled life - if he was seeing a therapist.

Hemingway disclosed to them that he was indeed seeing one, naming his Royal deluxe typewriter. “There is nothing to writing”, he added. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed”. One imagines that bleeding here equates with sublimating - sublimating your malaise through the cleansing act of writing.

Clearly, I will not, when I myself sit down to write my own book, produce A Farewell To Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls (I’m not mad), but I will try to probe my past as a child of the Nakba, a member of that generation of Palestinians who act as guardians of its memory and to whom the task of guardianship is both pride and burden. Perhaps somewhere, as I probe, I will discover why that small, but powerful part of the world that sides with our occupiers is, well, okay with killing Palestinians, harassing them from the earth and reducing to a fragment their human worth as a people.

Perhaps in writing I will know absolution of sorts, a healing of that wound that every Palestinian alive today feels gnawing at him like a raw wound.

And, hey. The hiatus I’m taking from my column is not, I say, permanent. A return after that hoped-for absolution is written either in the stars or in cup leaves. Moreover, I’ll still be around. I’ll drop by to say hello to write a column here and there. So, we’ll be checking each other out.

Till then, farewell, dear readers.

Fawaz Turki, a distinguished academic, journalist, and author residing in Washington DC, wrote The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.