In his author biography, Edward Salem identifies himself as a former performance artist. It’s all too easy to read that description not just as a disclaimer, but a joke. “Performance art,” after all, is not so infrequently a punchline. But Salem hasn’t given up on it and it’s the structuring matrix of his book Intifadas, a series of imagined, documented, planned, fantasized performances, now transposed into short poems, now into extended prose, and finally into a series of detailed instructions for readers to perform themselves. A non-exhaustive selection include:
– Cutting down an olive tree on his family land, chopping it up, and mailing the dismembered pieces back to his home in Detroit, where they’ll be reassembled into a “Frankensteinian tree.”
– Outfitting local youth with “red ball gags” and t-shirts emblazoned with “Submissive” to wear to weekly protests in the West Bank village of Bil‘in.
– Dropping leaflets calling for a Third Intifada from the roof of “an old limestone building”
– Having his cousin film him submerging his head in the burningly salty water of the Dead Sea and “forcing my burning eyes open / as much as I could.”
– Having his cousin film him lying prostrate on the threshold of Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue.
– Bringing “three packets of mayonnaise / to smear on the stone coffin” (Jesus’s?) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
– Spending several days smashing a boulder with a sledgehammer outside Ramallah, then writing “Why isn’t there a Third Intifada?” on the fragments.
There’s no denying that described performances are often funny. And, in some cases at least, that they’d make something like “good art.” But they also tend to fail before they start, which is what makes the book work so well. Hence,
– Cutting down an olive tree and removing it from the land seems “downright colonial.”
– It turns out the activists in Bil‘in had already outdone him when, in 2009, they “painted their bodies cornflower blue” and dressed up as the Na’vi from Avatar. (Google the images)
– Instead of dispersing in the wind, the stack of leaflets drops like a brick and breaks the cameraman’s hand.
– The cousin he’s roped into filming is amused, but also “didn’t understand why I’d torture myself / to make joke art no one wanted to see.”
– Someone, a “you” who looks like his mother, convinces him not to smear the mayo on Christ’s tomb.
– While writing on the stone fragments, “my hand got tired of the tedious task.”
Is the point, then, that the would-be artist is, at base, a privileged American making self-absorbed art that runs roughshod over his ancestral land? (I’ll call him Eddie, which is how he’s identified in the book.) If so, it might be an antidote to a sentimentalized strain of “diaspora poetry,” but only at the cost of being both trite and reactionary. But if it’s more than that, and it is more than that, these never-performed performances—the fact they’re never performed—take on something else entirely. What may seem, at times to be a portrait of the ex-performance artist as affable edgelord (in Paris, Eddie propositions a trans sex worker before chickening out; in West Jerusalem, he pushes his Jewish wife over as she squats to piss in the street) turns out to be a way of capturing the tenuous place of a Palestinian American back in his homeland without obscuring the way that his Americanness, chosen or not, sets him apart. (Recalling an earlier, perhaps more hopeful exploration in Annemarie Jacir’s 2007 film Salt of this Sea.)
Visiting Gaza on a solidarity delegation, “It hurt to imagine” leaving the besieged territory. The young men he meets also want him to return, write messages to him asking when he’s coming back—and also for help with sponsoring their visas. In a nightmare, he dreams “The dead Palestinian brother.” No mention of cause of death, but for anyone who knows about the history and present of Zionism, does there need to be? And then, more nightmarish still, “I slap your dead foreheads / with my blue and gold passport.” Suddenly, the “dumb fun” Eddie had been having, and in which the book itself revels, turns into something haunting, brutal. Underneath it all is a reckoning with the meaning of the longed for Third Intifada, the stakes and imperative of a transformative uprising even knowing the reprisals that will follow. It’s not a question unique to someone in Eddie’s position. He reads a news article “teasing the possibility / of the Third Intifada.” It’s the event he’s far from alone in longing for. Then, “All I could think was the scores of men my age and younger who would be slaughtered, / and how I wanted it anyway, / the uprising.”