Subsistence as Revolution

Notes on Vietnam and Palestine

Organizing my thoughts after a short work-trip to Hanoi a few weeks back:

1. In a number of vital indicators (life expectancy, adult literacy, employment), Vietnam fares very well. So I was struck by the willingness of the comrade to be tutored by the capitalist - I was on their team this trip - on Development: growth by all means.

2. This after being the only country in the world to have successfully overthrown three colonizers back to back (Japan, France, and the US) in the last century. You would expect the revolutionary spirit to have seeped in the DNA of the Vietnamese so irrevocably that it would smell the colonizing stench from a mile away. And yet.

3. Is Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary spirit no match for the DNA of Developmentitis?

4. Today, all talk of revolution and colonization is overshadowed by a human-rights discourse which fetishes the victim, quietly occluding the colonizer who sets the rules for what is acceptable prose (and poem). All the while as the oppressor actively rains down death, we grieve the victims in passive voice.

5. Passive, we inadvertently laud the oppressor and celebrate the colonizer, cognitive dissonance be damned: nothing than cannot be taken care of by some mindful breathing and a few pills.

6. In view of this zeitgeist of collusive silence, I move from spoken-of revolutions of the past to the unspoken revolution of subsistence: two works-in-progress.

7. The first, trying to capture resistance to capital using whatever public data I could muster.

   

8. And the second, an incipient attempt to do something similar for Palestine.

   

9. Closing off with Fadwa Tuqan:
   “It is enough for me to die on her land, to be buried in her, and beneath her soil to melt and vanish, then to be reborn as grass on her earth, to be reborn as a flower played with by the hand of a child my homeland has nurtured. It is enough for me to remain in the embrace of my homeland as soil, grass, and a flower.”