Published in As-Safir newspaper in 1978, this essay by Saadallah Wannous captures the Syrian playwright’s anguish after the Camp David Accords, a series of normalization agreements signed in secret by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin following the 1967 Naksa. Rather than write off this string of defeats as historical inevitability beyond his control, Wannous declares his own complicity in the dispossession of Palestine. Without realizing it, the intellectual class — the leftist playwrights, journalists, and thinkers from Damascus to Baghdad — had built a “sandcastle” with their words. Had they been more attuned to “authoritarian conspiracies and practices of misinformation,” he wrote, perhaps they could have predicted their own vanquishment. Perhaps they could have done something to prevent it. But it was not enough to discern his own blame. Wannous believed that the work of the Arab intellectual was to transform word to action, to find a language in the silence of defeat, and ultimately, to revive the liberation struggle.
The funeral procession moves along, and we trudge behind it, dragging our tails. We are the funeral procession and the mourners together. Half of me is in the coffin, while the other half trudges behind, tail between its legs.
The rhythm of the funeral procession is time — history. The days slip by, soft and slick, then sink into sand and sorrow like our footsteps.
We do not wail. We’ve grown accustomed to walking behind the coffin. We’ve grown accustomed to forgetting that we are walking behind the coffin. We slide along with the days until the sand swallows us and erases us.
If only the radio stations would stop their howling, if only the vocal cords of the mercenario singers were torn from their throats, if only the Arab rulers would show restraint in their speeches and ululations, then the solemnity of silence might bestow some dignity upon our procession.
O’ radio stations, O’ rulers, a little silence. In that coffin lies a homeland, a cause, and hopes of a lifetime.
—
The funeral procession moves along…
Parts of me are in the coffin, while other parts trudge behind it, dragging tails.
As stated in the second Camp David Accord, “[Following the signing of the peace agreement and completion of the temporary withdrawal, Egypt and Israel] agree that the normal relationship established between them will include full recognition, diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations, termination of economic boycotts and discriminatory barriers to the free movement of people and goods, and will guarantee the mutual enjoyment by citizens of the due process of law.”
And Carter said: “It’s been more than 2,000 years since there was peace between Egypt and a free Jewish nation. If our present expectations are realized, this year we shall see such peace again”
And Carter said: “The idea of Arab nationalism has become obsolete.”
And Carter said: “The Palestine Liberation Organization is nothing but a terrorist gang, no different from Nazi groups or the Ku Klux Klan.”
And when Sadat, in his speech before the People’s Assembly, saluted President Carter, the hall erupted in a storm of applause and cheers that lasted three minutes.
And Lebanon is a bleeding wound. Its geography is torn between partition, internationalization, and Israel.
Camille Chamoun asked Israel to intervene militarily to help the right-wing factions establish their own state within Lebanon.
And the Syrian army abandoned the rocks of the Golan to drown in the labyrinth of Lebanon.
And between northern and southern Yemen lies a ticking bomb sheltered by Oman with the help of Iran.
Across the Arab Maghreb, rifles are loaded and fingers rest on triggers, and the queues outside bakeries stretch and grow, and the oil flows into American and European pockets.
Television, radio, newspapers, speeches, all conspire, feverishly, to wash citizens’ brains and scrub their minds.
… And we do not wail…
—
The funeral procession moves along…
Parts of me are in the coffin, while other parts trudge behind, dragging tails.
Life has withered away, and I dream of saying “no.” I wanted to, and I want to say no to the citizen [who says] “yes” to the homeland-as-prison, to the modernization of torture and domestication, to official speeches, to Arab travel visas, to fragmentation and division, to referendums of 99.99%, to performative development plans, to balloon-filled celebrations, to wars that empower the policeman’s rule, to victories that crown oil princes as leaders of the Arabs, that double the profits of merchants, and lead to the Camp David Accords.
No to deception, to ignorance, to limpness, to starvation, to slaughtering, to massacres.
No to “yes.” And yes is the authoritarian definition of the Arab citizen from the [Atlantic] ocean to the Gulf [of Oman].
I wanted to, and I want to say no. I search for my tongue, and I only find a froth of blood and terror.
From my severed tongue, the defeat began, and the funeral procession commenced.
From my oppressed “no” across the Arab world, the enemy invaded, poverty, hunger, prison, torture, and the modern Arab collapse.
Had my “no” not been confiscated and muzzled, Khartoum’s “no’s” would not have been shattered, its fragments buried beneath the dunes of Sinai, and a man like Sadat would never have been able to deliver such devastating blows to the fate of the Arab world. Had my “no” not been confiscated and muzzled, I would not have been the shuttle with which Kissinger wove my shroud. I would not have been torn apart by bullets and destruction for four years in Beirut, and the ground beneath me would not have shattered, fenced in by hostilities, disputes, and impossible visas.
… In short, had my “no” not been confiscated and muzzled, half of me would not lie in a coffin, and the other half drag tails behind.
The confiscation of my “no” did not merely make me a victim and a spectator, nor a funeral procession and a mourner; it made me complicit. I feel now, with a searing mix of bitterness and shame, that I and millions with me have entrenched separation, squandered Palestine and the resistance, supported the machinery of repression, participated in the arbitrary withdrawal before the enemy, turned a blind eye to the Deversoir conspiracy, sent thousands to martyrdom for free, boarded the plane with Sadat when he visited Israel, and carved the morsel from my own hunger to feast the masters, the parasites, and the diesel princes.
Because my “no” was confiscated, I discovered in horror that within my wounded conscience lives a little Sadat, and that I am condemned to be a victim and a spectator, a funeral and a mourner, and above all, complicit.
—
The funeral procession is time — history; my personal and national history. And I say to you: no surreal image of bilateral or expanded conferences, consultations, and meetings will blind me from seeing my own funeral.
And I say to you: my heart does not beat because there are official “Nos” still fluttering in scattered corners of this homeland.
Sorrow has matured me and I have come of age.
From the hills of conferences and summits, I have harvested nothing but vertigo and mirages of declarations.
And I know that if I do not reclaim my own “no,” then all the official “no’s” will be nothing but empty words.
I say to you, “If I do not reclaim,” and beware that no one thinks I am pleading or begging for my right, I know full well that Arab thrones have meticulously arranged their list of threats, and on that list is the citizen who says “no,” a danger greater than that of Israel, a conspiracy more cunning than imperialism.
That is why it is futile to demand and beg. What I dream of and what I want is to reclaim…
…and until I reclaim my muzzled “no,” the funeral procession shall move along and we shall trudge behind, dragging our tails.
This piece appears in the twentieth issue of The New York War Crimes.