Fawaz Turki

Arab News

That was the way we saw it then: We were the generation around which the world revolved, or at least that part of it we called the Arab world, which we were destined to unite by one ideology into a single territorial homeland, a homeland that included a liberated Palestine. Our Pan-Arabist beliefs, so firmly entrenched in the repertoire of our consciousness, were a source of both identity and power that left no question unanswered, no answer in doubt.

We would follow our dreams, after decades of colonial rule and centuries of Ottoman stagnation, and build a society where the individual is imbued with the right to choose his own ends, where the free flow of ideas, generated by citizens bristling with national élan, would elevate us to a dignified place in the global dialogue of cultures. That was back in the late 1950s.

Last week, I turned the corner on this side of sixty, known as the “Big S,” when older men, all activists in their time — a time they once owned and were in the vanguard of — look back in anger, as it were, and ask what could have happened, where it went wrong, and why after half a century of independence, we inhabit not only a part of the world whose political discourse is too dreary to satisfy the public’s moral energies, but the only part of the world where there are two foreign occupations, in two separate countries in it, dictating the national destiny of the citizens, and rendering “irrelevant” or hunting down their leaders.

Perhaps my generation today, as it schleps around into its sixties and “howls” questions at itself, is the more authentic “beat generation” than its American counterpart back then — that is, if you consider not the cultural but the etymological origins of the term, which comes to us via Jack Kerouac, author of “On the Road,” emblematic novel of the 50s, who appropriated it from a drug-addled Times Square drifter who by using it meant that he was fatigued, or “beat,” by his existence.

For many years, we have embraced the fiction that our problems stem from the fact that we are ruled over in the Arab world by a repressive leadership, and once that leadership is removed, all will be well and good with us. But the sad fact is that repression is reflected on every level of our culture — in our family system, our educational system, our social system.

And in a trickle-down effect, this is reflected in our personal relations, in the interaction between employer and employee, teacher and student, husband and wife, man and woman, rich and poor, powerful and helpless, and the rest of it. The repression that characterizes our leadership is a mere outward projection of the values that inform our culture.

It is that very culture that needs the housecleaning (do you remember, as a case in point, the Arab Human Rights Development Report 2000?). So long as we lack consciousness — or refuse to admit the existence — of this fact, we are doomed to move around the treadmill of immemorially posited norms that will keep us mired in our backwardness, inhabiting a society broken in back and spirit, helplessly throwing furtive glances over our shoulders, seeking a glimpse of the glories in the Arab past, much as the man who had gone blind early in life continues to see his surroundings in terms of remembered images, and our leaders glibly speaking of the “peace of the brave,” much as the man who jumps off a high-rise building and, as he passes the tenth floor, waves at the people inside, shouting exultantly, “See, I’m not hurt.”

These are, to be sure, the morbid thoughts, written down, if you wish, as punitive self-address of a man who has turned sixty, looking at four decades during which he had identified with, and tied his self-esteem to, a cause upon which has been heaped all the riot and humiliation in the world.

Perhaps there is a new, not just another, generation of young Arabs out there who believe as we had done that the world revolved around them, or at least that part of it we call the Arab world, which they are destined to unite.... . And they are determined not to see history repeated because, well, this time around, they have learned from it.